The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Luke

A character in The Handmaid's Tale

Luke

Luke is Offred’s husband from before Gilead and the father of her daughter.

The book

Cover of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's TaleMargaret Atwood, 1985

One woman remembers freedom while authoritarian rules become ordinary through repetition, fear, and religious language.

View the book

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Luke is Offred’s husband from before Gilead and the father of her daughter. Their relationship began while he was married to someone else, a fact Gilead uses to classify Offred as sexually fallen. He tries to flee with the family and is separated from Offred during capture. She imagines several possible outcomes, but the novel never confirms whether he lived.

If you like The Handmaid's Tale

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Margaret Atwood

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Paul Bowles

    Paul Bowles

    American novelist and composer whose expatriate fiction explores dislocation, unstable intimacy, fatalism, and North Africa.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Mary Shelley

    Mary Shelley

    The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.

    View author