"I Who Have Never Known Men" by Jacqueline Harpman

For the month of November, we will read "I Who Have Never Known Men", by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman Protected content Protected content was a Belgian writer and psychoanalyst.

Originally published in Protected content French, the book was relatively unknown internationally and went out of print in later years, until its English translation in recent years has experienced a surge in popularity.

Description from Goodreads:
"As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom."

208 pages

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