The Testaments: where to start reading
Adapts The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at The Testaments.
The first season adapts the opening stretch of Atwood's sequel, heavily remixed — ages shift, the girls' separate strands merge, June steps on screen. Read the novel from page one: everything the season used plays differently there, and the book's later movements are untouched. Season 2 is confirmed to continue. If you skipped it, The Handmaid's Tale novel comes first.
Season 1 leaves off about 40% in. Pick the book up right there:
The Testaments
What the show changed here
- ChangedThe show sits about four years after The Handmaid's Tale's TV finale; the novel jumps more than fifteen years past the original.
- ChangedAgnes and Daisy are made the same age and share scenes under Aunt Lydia; the novel keeps their strands roughly a decade apart.
- ChangedDaisy's introduction is reworked for the show's compressed timeline, giving the character a different route into the story than the novel uses.
- InventedJune (Elisabeth Moss) appears in surprise cameos from premiere to finale; she is not a character in the novel at all.
- ChangedAunt Lydia's backstory carries over from The Handmaid's Tale's own continuity rather than the novel's version, where she was a family court judge before Gilead.
- ChangedCommander Judd is aged well down from the novel's much older man, softening one of the book's most disturbing dynamics.
- CutThe novel's later movements — where its three testimonies converge — sit beyond this season and stay unread.
Season 1 adapts Atwood's 2019 sequel loosely and only in part: the show sits about four years after The Handmaid's Tale's TV finale where the novel jumps more than fifteen, puts Agnes and Daisy side by side at the same age, adds June herself, and covers roughly the novel's opening stretch in shuffled order. The book's convergence is untouched and season 2 is confirmed. The Handmaid's Tale is the foundation underneath both shows — its own page maps that series.
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