I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
This one crawled under my skin and stayed there.
Genre? Hard to say. Dystopia, sure—but it’s not your run-of-the-mill ruined-city, ash-on-the-wind kind of story. This is deeper. Stranger. Like waking up in a dream you can’t remember entering. It touches on the depth of humanity and how we forge bonds in the most unlikely circumstances.
The story follows 40 women who are locked in a cage underground. Three men guard them, silent as stone, carrying whips to subdue and control the women. No one knows how long they’ve been there—decades possibly—but time’s a ghost in this place. All they have to mark the passage of time is their grey hair, wrinkles, and a young girl who grows into a woman. The women can’t remember their pasts. They know they had children, husbands, joy, and freedom. However, that was all taken from them like a thief in the night. Without any context, they don't know how they got in the cage. Some think their memories were wiped.
At the center of it all is a girl—young, raw, unformed. She grows up in the dark, wrestling with the weight of her own body, the mystery of desire, the ache of being utterly alone. There’s no comfort here. You won’t get answers. But you will get truth. Truth about what it means to be human.
This isn’t a book about escape—it’s about female resolve. About what it means to be human when the world forgets you ever were. A quiet, haunting tale of female companionship and the fragile threads of connection that keep us from going mad.
This book has officially found its place among my favorites. You will not get answers to your questions, and you will be left with complex moral ambiguity. However, you will find beauty in the story. You will ask the question, how can one bear to live in those circumstances? And you will find the answer in an unlikely young woman who finds pleasure in the small, and relationships in the darkest of places. The book plunges the depth of what it means to be human, what it means to have connection, what it means to show mercy, and what it means to overcome your circumstances.
