'Handmaid's Tale' Has Massive Library Waitlist As Readers See Link To Trump's America

NEW YORK, NY — "The Handmaid's Tale" is hot property as fans prepare for its adaptation to the small screen this month.

The New York Public Library has added dozens of copies of Margaret Atwood's novel as readers get ready for the 1o-episode adaptation to air on Hulu.

A spokeswoman for the NYPL, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, said that in February, readers placed 183 holds on its 64 copies. By March, the NYPL had added 32 more copies of the book to circulation, and the number of holds had jumped to 534.

The library system plans to add still more copies of the title in April to meet demand.

The tale depicts the Republic of Gilead, formerly the U.S., run by a totalitarian regime. Women are second-class citizens in Gilead, forbidden from owning property or having paying jobs. Fertile women are treated as reproductive factories and enlisted to bear children for upper-class men.

Many readers turned to "The Handmaid's Tale" in the wake of President Donald Trump's election in November amid increased anxieties about how the Trump administration would address women's rights and reproductive health.

"In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate," Atwood wrote in the New York Times of the book's recent resurgence.

"Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries."

The novel has been popular since its 1985 debut, but interest resurged in the wake of the election and amid advance publicity from the highly-anticipated Hulu miniseries.

More than 30 years after it was first published, "The Handmaid's Tale" is back on the New York Times' bestseller list for paperback trade fiction. It's been on that list for the past seven weeks, and it climbed two spots to number five on the latest ranking.

The book is the 17th most popular title sold by Amazon so far this year. Another dystopian novel, George Orwell's "1984," has seen a similar post-election sales spurt and it's at number 5 on Amazon's 2017 list.

Russell Perreault, a publicist for the book's current publisher, told NPR that there's been a 200 percent increase in sales of the book since the election.

The Hulu series, which stars Elisabeth Moss, premieres April 26. You can join people waiting for the book in the NYPL system here.

Lead image by Ciara McCarthy/Patch.