Book Review - I who have never known men - Jacqueline Harpman (2025 #4)

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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 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.

Not a book I would ever have chosen for myself but for me that's the whole point of doing a reading challenge - to challenge myself and widen my reading.

This book certainly did that. Set in an undetermined time and an undetermined place it's told in a stream of consciousness style by a woman whose earliest memories are of living with 39 other women, caged underground, guarded by men.

By chance and a freak event the women escape but the landscape they find themselves in unforgiving and freedom is not how they anticipated it.

The book is bleak but I appreciated how the author got inside the head of the narrator and created this situation and experiences. Definitely outside my comfort zone but I didn't struggle to read it.
I'm not sure I found some aspects of it credible (although it's all the author's creation) which is why I wouldn't give it 5 stars plus it would not be to everyone's liking.

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