Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. 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. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. L'Express called it "poignant" and "magnificent", and the product of a "profoundly original imagination".About the Book "Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Kirkus Reviews compared it to The Handmaid's Tale, and said that it is "thin", but "moving" and "powerful". The New York Times described the novel as "bleak but fascinating", and "about as heavyhearted as fiction can get".
The book was a finalist for the 1995 Prix Femina. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. The guards are all male, and never speak to them. Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. It was originally published by Seven Stories Press, then republished by Avon Eos. It is the first of Harpman's novels to be translated into English.
I Who Have Never Known Men, originally published in French as Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, is a 1995 science fiction novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman.
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