BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Tina Dehealy and this is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,

a space to ask one big question about one big story.

Today we're asking, could the Handmaid's tale happen in real life.

Last night hundreds of Margaret Atwood fans gathered at a water stones in central London

for Harry Potter's style launch of her new book, The Testaments. The Q stretch around the corner.

I flew from Berlin to the leader.

It's the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale,

a dystopian novel first published more than 30 years ago.

It's become a phenomenon thanks to the recent TV series and explosion of feminist politics.

For generations it's been inspiring young girls in secondary schools

so I think that a sequel obviously is something that everyone's excited about.

The book imagines a future version of the US called

Gilead where fertile women, the handmaids, have become so rare that they're

enslaved and forced to reproduce.

At the launch, pairs of women dressed in the handmaid's red robes and white caps walked

silently by.

Some of you all know me as the woman who got Jane Austin on a bank note.

Celebrity fans and women's rights activists were there.

This is probably one of the most anticipated literary moments that in my generation and I think the

handmaid tale has been like her work has had such an enduring power even for our

generation even though she wrote it in 1985. Gina Martin featured on a previous

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