I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman

I Who Have Never Known Men is a powerful and haunting dystopian novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, originally published in French in 1995 as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes and translated into English in 1997.

The story begins in an underground cage where forty women are held captive by silent male guards who never explain why they’re there. Thirty‑nine of the women vaguely remember life before imprisonment, but one the unnamed narrator, a child when the incarceration began has no memory at all of the outside world and has “never known men.”

For years, the prisoners live in monotonous conditions with basic food, light, and no sense of time or freedom. Then one day, an alarm sounds and the guards inexplicably flee. The women escape into a vast, barren plain devoid of other humans and familiar signs of civilization. They form a fragile community, striving to survive, build dwellings, and retain their humanity amid isolation and hopelessness.

The narrator the only one without memories of the world before captivity becomes a witness to the group’s struggle, grappling with existential questions about identity, memory, and what it means to be human without society’s usual structures or patriarchal norms.

As decades pass, the women age, fall ill, and die one by one, leaving the narrator alone. She wanders and explores, ultimately discovering an underground bunker stocked with books and equipment, which becomes the place where she records her memoirs. Facing death from uterine cancer, she reflects on life, memory, and the intrinsic resilience of the human spirit even in a world stripped of all meaning and answers.