Absolutely everyone seems to be talking about Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men and for VERY good reason. Originally published in French in 1995, the tiny but mighty novel was republished in 2022 and has had a resurgence in popularity, largely thanks to the power of BookTok.
I Who Have Never Known Men confronts what it means to be human when everything is taken from you. 39 women and 1 young girl are imprisoned underground with no clear memory of how or why they got there. The male guards who patrol and feed the women refuse to reveal anything (rude). Monotonous and bleak years pass despite the women having no concept of time to record them (me and my Google Calendar obsession could never). One day, the youngest prisoner makes a discovery that could be the key to the women's escape, but what will they find above ground?
The novel is truly speculative post-apocalyptic fiction at its best—gripping, introspective, a bit strange, and will leave you with a lump in your throat. It was not at any moment quite what I expected and as soon as I finished reading I immediately felt the urge to pick it up again. Could not recommend enough!!
If you also loved I Who Have Never Known Men and are looking for another book to alter your perception of existence, check out the below reading recommendations.
'On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses...'
'Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river, or handed over to the Memory Police.'
'Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?'
'A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end.'
'She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival. This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.'
'What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America.'
'The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.'
'If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?'
'Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.'
'Two people, until recently strangers, find themselves on a long, tortuous and dangerous journey across the ice. One is an outcast, forced to leave his beloved homeland; the other is fleeing from a different kind of persecution. What they have in common is curiosity, about others and themselves, and an almost unshakeable belief that the world can be a better place. As they journey for over 800 miles, across the harshest, most inhospitable landscape, they discover the true meaning of friendship, and of love.'
'In a remote Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and violated-by what many thought were ghosts or demons-as punishment for their sins. Their accounts were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.''
'Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. When the women learn that they were in fact drugged and attacked by men in their community, they hold a secret meeting in a hayloft.'
'They have two days to make a plan before the rapists are bailed out and brought home: will they dare to escape?'
'We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time. America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe.'
'Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal.'
'Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves. Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.'
'An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge.'
'It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a guest, there to stay for the season…In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point.'
'What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.'
