i who have never known men by jacqueline harpman

I mean that both literally and metaphorically. None of us had expected that it would happen so painlessly. Everything went according to plan, just as it had been run through for us beforehand, on the lines explained in the brochures we received with our enrolment forms. I have been installed in one of the rooms on the top floor here in the hotel. As Salena Godden later said in her celebration of Termush, this hypnotic novella immediately felt like ‘someone from the future screaming to us in the past.’ That quality was obvious from the very first page: The joy of being a classics editor is opening a book lost for decades and instantly feeling the electricity of an utterly contemporary voice. What was this odd creature? I sat down at the ancient archive table and devoured it in one sitting. On taking it off the shelf, I was intrigued by the hazy scarlet cover depicting an atomic mushroom cloud. Suddenly, a slim spine with the mysterious word ‘Termush’ emblazoned across it caught my eye. One day, I was browsing Faber’s dusty stacks – filled with all our titles published over the last 90 years – on the hunt for overlooked classics. It was the kind of moment I dream of in my role as an archive mole. L'Express called it 'poignant' and 'magnificent', and the product of a 'profoundly original imagination'.Ella Griffiths, Faber’s ‘archive mole’ (that is, classics editor), introduces the latest in the superb Faber Editions series, Sven Holm’s Termush, a Danish novella of nuclear apocalypse that had her hooked from the very first page. 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.

I who have never known men by jacqueline harpman