The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood

The novel alternates between the perspectives of three women, presented as portions of a manuscript written by one (the Ardua Hall Holograph) and testimony by the other two.

Lydia, a divorced judge, is imprisoned with other women in a stadium during the establishment of Gilead. After enduring weeks of squalid conditions and solitary confinement, she and a small group of other women are handpicked by Commander Judd and Vidala, a pre-existing supporter of Gilead, to become Aunts - an elite group of women tasked with creating and overseeing the laws and uniforms governing Gilead's women. The Aunts use Ardua Hall as their headquarters and enjoy certain privileges that include reading "forbidden" texts, such as Cardinal John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. In secret, Aunt Lydia despises Gilead and becomes a mole supplying critical information to the Mayday resistance organization.

Fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, a girl named Agnes Jemima is growing up in Boston as the adopted daughter of Commander Kyle and his wife Tabitha. Agnes has a loving relationship with Tabitha, who later dies of ill health. Agnes and her classmates Becka and Shunammite attend an elite preparatory school for the daughters of Commanders, where they are taught to run a household, but not to read or write. Once widowed, Commander Kyle marries Paula, the widow of a deceased Commander. She despises Agnes, acquires a Handmaid who conceives a son, Mark, for herself, and arranges for Agnes to be married to Commander Judd, now a high-ranking official in charge of the Eyes and surveilling the population of Gilead.

Agnes later learns that she is the daughter of a Handmaid. She manages to escape her arranged marriage by becoming a Supplicant, a prospective Aunt. In that pursuit she joins Becka, whose father - Doctor Grove, a prominent dentist - has been sexually abusing her and his other underage female patients for years. Later, Agnes is anonymously provided with files highlighting the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of Gilead, specifically evidence of adultery between Commander Kyle and Paula and their respective uxoricide and mariticide of their spouses (divorce having been prohibited in Gilead). She also learns that she is the sister of "Baby Nicole," a girl who was smuggled out of Gilead to Canada by her Handmaid mother when she was young (and whose return the government of Gilead has been demanding).

Meanwhile, a girl named Daisy - several years younger than Agnes - grows up in Toronto's Queen Street West with her adoptive parents, Neil and Melanie. The couple owns a second-hand clothes shop that serves as a front for Mayday to smuggle women out of Gilead. On her 16th birthday, Daisy's adoptive parents are murdered by undercover Gilead operatives, who also obtain information about the smuggling operations. Daisy is spirited into hiding by several Mayday operatives, who reveal that Daisy is actually Nicole.

Running out of hiding places for Nicole, the Mayday operatives enlist her in a mission to infiltrate Gilead in order to obtain invaluable intelligence from their mysterious mole. Nicole poses as a street urchin named Jade in order to be recruited by the Pearl Girls, Gilead missionaries who lure foreign women to Gilead with the promise of a better life. The plan works, and Nicole is picked up by the Pearl Girls and taken to Gilead.

The disguised Nicole is placed under the care of Agnes and Becka, who are now respectively named Aunts Victoria and Immortelle. Aunt Lydia confirms that "Jade" is Nicole through a tattoo and discloses her true identity and parentage to Agnes and Becka. Revealing herself as Mayday's mole, Aunt Lydia enlists the three young women in a mission to smuggle incriminating information about Gilead's elite into Canada. Nicole is tasked with carrying the files inside a microdot on her tattoo. Aunt Lydia's plan is for Agnes and Nicole to enter Canada disguised as Pearl Girls, with Nicole impersonating Becka. The real Becka, disguised as Jade, is to remain at a retreat.

However, Aunt Lydia and the girls are forced to hasten their plans when Commander Judd learns about Nicole's presence and plans to marry her in order to consolidate his political power. Under Aunt Lydia's instructions, Agnes and Nicole travel by bus to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then by boat along the Penobscot River. This boat takes them to a larger vessel whose captain is tasked with smuggling them to Canada. After reaching Canadian waters, Agnes and Nicole travel on an inflatable to Campobello Island, where they are picked up by a Mayday team.

Using the information inside Nicole's microdot, the Canadian media leaks scandalous information about Gilead's elite, which leads to a purge that in turn causes a military coup, bringing about the collapse of Gilead and the subsequent restoration of the United States. Agnes and Nicole are reunited with their mother. Aunt Lydia steals a vial of morphine and prepares to give herself a lethal overdose before she can be arrested and executed. It is also revealed that Becka died while hiding in a cistern to perpetuate the ruse that "Jade" had run off with a plumber. The novel concludes with a metafictional epilogue, described as a partial transcript of an international historical association conference. The events of the novel are framed by a lecture read by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto at the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, in 2197. He questions whether Aunt Lydia wrote the Ardua Hall Holograph. He is also curious about the identities of Agnes, Nicole, and their Handmaid mother.