18 May 2020
The big adult fiction title of this past fall was Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. The sequel to the author's 1985 bestseller The Handmaid's Tale was unveiled with a 500,000-copy first printing. At the time, The Handmaid's Tale was benefitting from a surge of interest in its wildly popular TV adaptation on Hulu, and from a renewed interest in dystopian tales following the election of Donald Trump. Now, with the globe seized by a pandemic and millions of Americans hunkered down because of shelter-at-home orders, editors say they are interested in lighter fare-mostly.