Jess's Reviews > I Who Have Never Known Men

‘I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.’

Viscerally disturbing, elegant and dignified. Better even than The Handmaid’s Tale.

This is the most haunting and thought-provoking book I have read in a very long time. Harpman’s prose is stark and stylistically perfect, charged throughout with an agonising inexorability. It’s a powerful concept besides: a slim dystopian novel narrated by an anonymous woman, whose only life she has ever known is that of being locked in a cage in a bunker with thirty-nine other women. Her narrative is deeply introspective, despite her complete and utter inexperience. And regardless of her intense capacity for emotion, she is convinced she is not entirely human.

At once exquisite and devastating, I am at a loss to understand how this has not reached a wider audience. I Who Have Never Known Men is a profoundly sad novel that revels in its ambiguity.