'The Handmaid's Tale' and '1984' Return to Amazon's Bestsellers ...
Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian classic saw a 1,826 percent increase on the retailer's Movers & Shakers list the day after the election
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Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale has returned to the top of Amazon’s bestsellers charts, less than 24 hours following the reelection of Donald Trump, a convicted felon and twice impeached former president, to a second term.
The day after Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election, Atwood’s dystopian bestselling book saw a staggering 1,826% increase in sales on Amazon’s Movers & Shakers chart. The book previously sat in the 443 spot on the list and has jumped to the eighth spot on the chart.
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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’Paperback
Atwood’s bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale returned to the top of Amazon’s charts following the 2024 election results. It’s available in paperback, hardcover, audiobook, and on Kindle.
The dystopian novel is set in a post-war future as “declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women,” as the book’s logline goes.
In a Rolling Stone interview back in 2021, Atwood discussed watching Trump’s rise “With trepidation! We’ve seen this before. It’s right out of the playbook. The big propaganda lies, the replacement of people in pivotal positions in the judiciary — because every totalitarian regime controls the judiciary. The attempt to subvert the Constitution, the attempted coup. These are motifs that have occurred many times throughout history. The attempt to seize control of communications media. They couldn’t actually do that, but they could try to erase belief in the media as a trustworthy source of information, and replace that with other sources that were telling you there are blood-drinking Democrats in the cellar of a pizza parlor that didn’t have a cellar.”
Continued Atwood, “It was either Hitler or Goebbels who said if you tell the big lie often enough, people will believe it. Make the lie big, and make it often. We saw that. And it’s not a question of left or right — so-called left regimes have done the same thing. It’s a question of totalitarianism or not totalitarianism.”
Also a hit Hulu series which premiered during Trump’s first term, The Handmaid’s Tale is one of many titles that have seen sales spikes since the election was called. George Orwell’s 1984 bestseller has climbed back on Amazon’s bestsellers chart as well, seeing a 63% jump and landing at the No. 23 spot on the list.
Bestseller return
‘1984’ by George OrwellPaperback
Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel has also received a rush of sales following the election, up 63% at the time of this writing.
Elsewhere on the list, a book on Melania Trump by Victoria Hart, Unveiling the Journey of America’s Most Controversial First Lady, currently holds the top spot on the Movers & Shakers chart with a 175,080% increase. Meantime, Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives by Sami Sage and Emily Amick sits just behind it, up 38,188%.
The president-elect, vice president-elect J.D. Vance, and former first lady’s books also appear on the list, with The Art of the Deal up 349%, Hillbilly Elegy up 1,825%, and Melania seeing a 300% increase. See more of the titles on the Movers & Shakers bestsellers chart on Amazon.
