Margaret Atwood on the Graphic Novel Adaptation of her classic The Handmaid’s Tale

Renee Nault’s (above) eagerly awaited graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s classic A Handmaid’s Tale is finally on sale. If you haven’t had a look inside, here’s a preview of the opening pages, and Nault has done a spectacular job.

And Atwood agrees, as she exclusively told The Beat: “Renee is a painstaking professional with a wonderful dense of design and colour. She handpainted every panel herself – it took longer than expected, partly because she had a wrist injury — but it was well worth the wait!”

Nault has been a respected illustrator for a while, but this book is going to put her on the radar of many more people.

Here’s a bit more about the book:

Originally published in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s novel THE HANDMAID’S TALE is a seminal work of fiction: influential and inspirational, provocative and prophetic. The book’s taut prose and unforgettable characters have been adapted into a major motion picture starring Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway, a radio play, a stage play, an opera, and, most recently, Hulu’s Emmy Award-winning show starring Elisabeth Moss. Now, on March 26, 2019, Doubleday Books will publish the first ever graphic novel adaptation of THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE Graphic Novel features the art of Renée Nault — a Canadian artist and frequent illustrator for the Los Angeles Times — who was hand-selected by Atwood to adapt her seminal novel. Nault tells the iconic story of Offred and the Republic of Gilead over the course of 240 full-color  pages. Her watercolor illustrations, which took her over two years to complete from initial sketches to final pages, are gorgeous and haunting.