We Were Forbidden

We Were Forbidden

$18.95

JACQUELINE HARPMAN

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human instinct: defiance.

In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.

Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe—her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.

Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice-weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

These novellas—the first work by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades—reveal her incredible stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice.

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PRAISE FOR JACQUELINE HARPMAN

“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

“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

“Unlike other science fiction or fantasy novels, this is a universe without an invented order: there is no known infrastructure, no reveal, no men hiding behind a curtain. It is the simplicity of the writing that makes my skin crawl, so eerie in its absences.”—Haley Mlotek, Frieze

“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