I Who Have Never Known Men
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
With an afterword by Sophie Mackintosh
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
Praise for I Who Have Never Known Men
“Paradoxically, the book’s austere mystery—the atrophied and gelid world it depicts—provides a richly allusive consideration of human life.”—Deborah Eisenberg , The New York Review of Books
“All the loneliness and oblivion of a deserted world won’t stop us from following the narrator as far as she can go… Each revelation that directs her steps is a small miracle.”—The New York Times
“A consistently gripping experience.”―TLS
“It is surprising that a book with the psychological detail of a nightmare elicits in the reader feelings of such profound intensity.”—Le Monde
“The delirium of I Who Have Never Known Men suggests the work of a feminine Kafka.”—Le Nouvel Observateur
Product Info
First Published: May 10, 2022
Fiction/Literary
5.25 x 8 | 184 pages
Rights: NA
978-1-945492-60-0 (paperback)
978-1-945492-62-4 (ebook)
