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.
Ye've also got to remember that ... respectable people do the most astonishin' things to preserve their respectability. Thank God I'm not respectable.