GalleyCat had an item about the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award. The book sure sounds a lot like Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale to me, but one thing I found interesting was that the book was published last year in the U.K. as The Carhullan Army but in the U.S. it's Daughters of the North.

The cover shown in the GalleyCat item is what I would call a literary fiction cover—a soft focus close-up of a woman's face. That combined with the fact that the publisher ditched the U.K. title in favor of one with no unfamiliar words (I think Carhullan is a place in Britain but if you don't know that, it sounds made-up) suggests the publisher (HarperPerennial) wants a book that says "shelve me with the mainstream books, please." I wonder if the publishers will be pleased to win a speculative fiction award or not?

Be interesting to see if they even mention it. Although to be fair, the author herself seems quite comfortable with the spec fic designation.