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I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1929. Being half Jewish, the family fled to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and only returned home after the war. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her training due to contracting tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. Harpman wrote over 15 novels and won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Orlanda. I Who Have Never Known Men was her first novel to be translated into English, and was originally published with the title The Mistress of Silence

SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL. 
 
Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation. 
 
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? 
 
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. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an 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. The woman who will never know men. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, BOOKER PRIZE-LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATER CURE

Jacqueline Harpman

FROM THE AUTHOR OF TIKTOK SENSATION I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN 
 
There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out. 
 
Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last. 
 
That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free. 
 
Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered. 
 
A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul. 
 
'Imagination. Jacqueline Harpman certainly doesn't lack any. . . . With incredible mastery, she juggles with identities, intertwines desires and fears, fantasies and frustrations.' –L'Express

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