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by Jacqueline Harpman
Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.
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.
"Like Kafka with a dash of Ursula Le Guin, this story is part mystery, part science fiction, and all literature." —Booklist
"Immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." —Kirkus Reviews
"[A] riveting narrative... . Carefully crafted, this novel is both unusual and thought-provoking." —Library Journal
"A vivid evocation of another world, alive with hope and dignity in the midst of cruelty and alienation... . A haunting testimony from an abandoned planet." —Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From
This information about I Who Have Never Known Men was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) was a Belgian author of over fifteen novels. Born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, she fled to Casablanca with her family during the Second World War. She studied French literature and trained to become a doctor but was unable to continue her medical studies after contracting tuberculosis. Harpman began writing in 1954, and wrote over fifteen novels, winning numerous prizes, including the Prix Médicis (Orlanda), the Prix Victor-Rossel (Brève Arcadie), among others. I Who Have Never Known Men, originally published in French in 1995, was the first of her books to be translated into English.
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