With its recent reprinting and regained hype on bookish social media, I decided to give Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men a read. With its dystopian sci-fi setting, raw detail, and startling exploration of the unknown, it is certainly something different, and will have you thinking about its content long after finishing.

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.

The dystopian elements of this novel are hammered in from the beginning, providing the reader with a terrifying situation: forty women (thirty-nine and a child, really) locked in a cage under constant supervision. It is not only confronting, but scary in its establishment of the setting and the power dynamics in place. Once the big change happens though, there is a glimpse of an eden, a parting from the hell of their enclosed lives. Then reality strikes and it is more horrifying than it initially seemed. The structure of the novel puts these stages into perspective, all the while threading in these literary fiction elements that make this novel so grounded, introspective, and insightful.

The main character is so interesting, not just because of her differences compared to the other women but in how she sees the world. Her understanding has an almost clinical aspect to it, yet she is curious and seeks knowledge. How she relates to others is so different to what I have seen in other works, classic and modern classic specifically, which sets her apart within the story while also allowing the deeper exploration into ideas, concepts, and behaviours. As I read I Who Have Never Known Men, I felt pity for her, understanding her at times desperate need for knowledge and they irritation at being denied it. I also felt sorry for her, not only because of what she lacks but because of what she is made to withstand because of who she is.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a book I can see a lot of readers enjoying, especially those in the science fiction or literary fiction band. It reminded me a little of This is How You Lose the Time War and The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, but it is also has features that are uniquely its own. I feel like fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven would enjoy I Who Have Never Known Men, though I can’t elaborate on that more given I haven’t yet read the book. It is giving similar vibes from what I have seen, and I feel it is a pretty safe comparison to make.