Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian author born into a Jewish family in 1929. She is best known for "I Who Have Never Known Men", a slim, sombre post-apocalyptic novel published in French in 1995 and subsequently translated into English. The book's nameless narrator is a girl who lives with 39 women in a cage in an underground bunker; the prisoners do not know why they are there. The novel evokes the horrors of Nazism.
After falling out of print, the book was reissued in 2019 by Vintage, a British publisher, with a revised translation. It became a viral sensation on TikTok and BookTok, with British sales rising more than fifty-fold by 2025 and the novel reaching the Washington Post's paperback bestseller chart.
You can't have everything... where would you put it?