I Who Have Never Known Men (Collector's Edition)
I Who Have Never Known Men (Collector's Edition)
Jacqueline Harpman
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
The runaway bestseller, now available in a special collector’s edition, with a new introduction from Carmen Maria Machado.
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
“A small miracle . . . I Who Have Never Known Men is about as heavyhearted as fiction can get.”—The New York Times
“Mesmerizing . . . 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
“A consistently gripping experience.”―Times Literary Supplement
“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
“Reading I Who Have Never Known Men forces the reader to contemplate what an immense privilege it is to be able to read books at all.”—Emily Gould, The Cut
“[I] couldn’t put it down. . . . It’s a deceptively simple but wholly propulsive story that explores the interplay between memory, patriarchy and solidarity.”—Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel
“[A] riveting narrative . . . Carefully crafted, this novel is both unusual and thought-provoking.”—Library Journal
“[An] eerily evocative novel . . . this intriguingly dark thought experiment told by a compellingly alien voice—dispassionate and unfussy—is strangely fascinating.”—Lucy Scholes, The Times
Product Info
First Published: September 9, 2025
Fiction/Literary
Hardcover | 5.25 x 8 | 216 pages
Rights: NA
979-8-893380-30-9 (hardcover)
