The Handmaid's Tale Gets New Release This November With Gorgeous New Images
Rianna is the Movie News Editor for ScreenRant. After earning her BA in Film Studies, she began her career as an entertainment writer, contributing to several publications before joining ScreenRant. Her dissertation on the impact of streaming on traditional cinema sharpened her focus on the ever-evolving world of film and media. With 10 years in the industry, Rianna continues to cover the stories she loves while also advocating for awareness and representation of rare disabilities, such as Moebius Syndrome, which she lives with.
The Handmaid's Tale is returning with a special release.
The Handmaid's Tale franchise began with Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel and has since become a cultural phenomenon with worldwide impact. Atwood wrote the novel as a fictional warning about patriarchal control, fundamentalism, and environmental and fertility crises in a totalitarian society called Gilead. It was adapted into an early feature film in 1990, followed by various stage plays, and then debuted as a series on Hulu in 2017, which made the franchise explode in popularity.
Folio Society is set to release a Limited Edition box set of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classics The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments on 3 November 2026. Atwood’s iconic novels, which imagine a near-future in which American women have lost all their civil rights, will be illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso, the multi-award-winning Italian artistic duo also known as the Balbusso Twins. The release is limited to just 750 copies, with each novel priced at $760.
Folio’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments will be presented in a stunning clamshell box, created by the Balbusso Twins. Taking inspiration from painting, sculpture, theater, cinema, fashion, graphics, photography, and engraving, the Balbusso Twins’ distinctive style combines traditional drawing and painting tools with digital methods. The Twins’ illustrations and cover design for The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments were designed with ‘a surrealist Nightmare' in mind.
The world-renowned author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Atwood, shared her thoughts on the upcoming release and stated:
"The Handmaid’s Tale is a very visual book. Those who lack power always see more than they say. It’s fitting that the illustrations in this Folio edition echo both the feel and the color palette of the thirties and forties, the age of the rise of the major dictatorships – and the signage and branding, as it were, of the future Gilead, which has an equal interest in propaganda and presentation coupled with its North American knack for catchy slogans."
The Balbusso Twins, who will hand-sign each copy, said: "Illustrating the 2012 edition of The Handmaid’s Tale was a pure lightning bolt for us; our red handmaids were born five years before the TV series, defining a unique dystopian iconographic milestone that served as a global blueprint for designers, artists, directors, and illustrators alike… When The Folio Society approached us to illustrate The Testaments, it felt like a natural homecoming: the perfect opportunity to fuse our twin creative souls, the graphic and the pictorial [for] this exceptional project."
Question 1 of 3
Notably, the new release happens to take place around Election Day in the U.S., which is eerily on brand for the novels and their contents, highlighting the importance of freedom and the rights that women have fought for that could also be stripped away. The Power author, Naomi Alderman, also shared a foreword for the collection and said, "In all the ways that fiction can be real, the Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments is real. It is the name of a force trying to push itself back into the world."
Folio Society's release of the Balbusso Twins' beautifully illustrated The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments limited edition box set will be available exclusively from the Folio Society on November 3.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.