I Who Have Never Known Men | Jacqueline Harpman, Ros Schwartz, Sophie Mackintosh

“A small miracle . . . I Who Have Never Known Men is about as heavyhearted as fiction can get.”—New York Times

“Mesmerizing. . . . The book’s austere mystery—the atrophied and gelid world it depicts—provides a richly allusive consideration of human life.”—Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books

“A consistently gripping experience.”―TLS

“Like Kafka with a dash of Ursula Le Guin, this story is part mystery, part science fiction, and all literature.”—Booklist

“Reading I Who Have Never Known Men forces the reader to contemplate what an immense privilege it is to be able to read books at all.”—Emily Gould, The Cut

“[I] couldn’t put it down. . . . It’s a deceptively simple but wholly propulsive story that explores the interplay between memory, patriarchy and solidarity.”—Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel

“Immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Evocative and thrilling, it’s a dystopian modern classic.”—Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club

“Harpman says here all there is to say about dignity and the difficulty of remaining human in the face of suffering.”—Le Quotidien

“It is surprising that a book with the psychological detail of a nightmare elicits in the reader feelings of such profound intensity.”—Le Monde

“The delirium of I Who Have Never Known Men suggests the work of a feminine Kafka.”—Le Nouvel Observateur

“[A] riveting narrative. . . . Carefully crafted, this novel is both unusual and thought-provoking.”—Library Journal

“Unlike other science fiction or fantasy novels, this is a universe without an invented order: there is no known infrastructure, no reveal, no men hiding behind a curtain. It is the simplicity of the writing that makes my skin crawl, so eerie in its absences.”—Haley Mlotek, Frieze

“[An] eerily evocative novel . . . this intriguingly dark thought experiment told by a compellingly alien voice—dispassionate and unfussy—is strangely fascinating.”—Lucy Scholes, The Times

“A vivid evocation of another world, alive with hope and dignity in the midst of cruelty and alienation. . . . A haunting testimony from an abandoned planet.”—Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

JACQUELINE HARPMAN (1929-2012) was a Belgian author of over fifteen novels. Born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, she fled to Casablanca with her family during the Second World War. She studied French literature and trained to become a doctor but was unable to continue her medical studies after contracting tuberculosis. Harpman began writing in 1954, and wrote over fifteen novels, winning numerous prizes, including the Prix Médicis (Orlanda), the Prix Victor-Rossel (Brève Arcadie), among others. I Who Have Never Known Men, originally published in French in 1995, was the first of her books to be translated into English.

ROS SCHWARTZ has translated numerous works of fiction and non-fiction from French, including several Georges Simenon titles for Penguin Classics, a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and, most recently, Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance. The recipient of a number of awards, she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009 and received the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence in 2017.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of Blue Ticket and The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.