Readers have been waiting 34 years for a sequel to Margaret Atwood's dystopian novelThe Handmaid's Tale – and now a lucky few won't have to wait a week longer.
The highly anticipated follow-up,The Testaments,appears to have escaped the Gilead-style security surrounding its planned worldwide release next Tuesday,sending publishers,publicity teams and the book media into a frenzy.
The novel is one of the biggest releases of the year and has been under lock and key,with even the Booker Prize judges,who added the novel to the award's shortlist yesterday,warned they would be held accountable if their watermarked copy broke the embargo.
But some fans who pre-ordered the book on Amazon were shouting"praise be"on Wednesday as they posted pictures on social media of copies ofThe Testaments,which appeared in their mail boxes close to a week before the novel's official publication date on September 10.
The apparent early release means that exclusive extracts from The Testamentsdue to be published in newspapers around the world,including in The Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age,were at the last minute pushed forward to Wednesday evening.
Amazon has been contacted for comment but had not responded to questions at the time of writing. Penguin Random House declined to comment.
The book is expected to be one of the bestselling novels in Australia this year,with first-week sales of about 10,000 copies anticipated.
The hype around the release includes an"expansive one-night festival"at the London bookstore Waterstones where Atwood,who has 1.9 million followers on Twitter,will give a midnight reading ofThe Testaments before participating in a Q&A that will be beamed to cinemas around the world.