Margaret Atwood Books in Order

Margaret Atwood has written seventeen novels across five decades, and almost none of them depend on each other - which makes the real question not what order to read in, but where to start and which two clusters have rules. Those clusters: the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam, one continuous story), and the Handmaid's pair, where The Testaments (2019) returns to Gilead thirty-four years later and assumes you know how the first book ended. The television age has made her shelf bigger than books alone: Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale ran six seasons, Netflix made Alias Grace, and The Testaments arrived on screen in 2026 - with Atwood herself cameoing as a prison guard. This page maps the shelf (1969–present).

Where to start

The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the book most readers arrive for; Oryx and Crake (2003) for the second door, and the one to pick if dystopia-by-politics is not your dystopia.

Does the reading order matter?

Publication order, with two rules. One: the MaddAddam trilogy is strict - Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013) tell overlapping halves of one collapse, and reading them out of order genuinely spoils them. Two: The Testaments (2019) after The Handmaid's Tale (1985), always - it is a sequel that trades on the first book's ending. Everything else is standalone by design: the early Toronto novels (The Edible Woman 1969 through Bodily Harm 1981), the big middle run (Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin), and the modern-myth retellings The Penelopiad (2005) and Hag-Seed (2016), which sit anywhere. Alias Grace (1996) pairs naturally with the Netflix miniseries (2017); on screens now, The Testaments series (2026) is the one to have read first. Her newest book is Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (2026) - nonfiction, not a novel

Which one is the best?

The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the canon; The Blind Assassin (2000), the Booker winner; Alias Grace (1996), the best-constructed plot.

Covered in depth here

An 8-question quiz, reading time, club questions and verified quotes for The Handmaid's Tale.

Related guides

Readers finishing this shelf usually want the map next door: George Orwell books in order, Aldous Huxley books in order, Ray Bradbury books in order. Every guide follows the same format — the shelf, the entry point, the honest answer about order.

Make it a project

Pick a session size and let the days accumulate — at the pace our reading speed test measures, most shelves above clear in a few weeks of half-hours. Every guide on the books in order shelf follows this same format, and when a book lands, its 8-question quiz is waiting on the original book quiz.