The Handmaids Tale by....?? Margaret Atwood not Attwood, and despite what Grab said, I wouldn't agree about Atwood or Leguin having a chip on their shoulders. I count those two authors as two of my favourites.

Atwood is excellent at building a story around individual and group complexities and the vagaries of human memory. Leguin creates fantasy or sci-fi social worlds and intelligently explores the implications of these social structures and the effects on the people living within them.

Helen