A 1995 novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman has shot up the bestsellers list in several countries after being embraced by TikTok users.
Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men is a dystopian tale of a girl who is locked in a cage in an underground bunker with 39 other women, guarded by men.
The narrator is the youngest of the captives and cannot remember anything about her life before the bunker.
US literary magazine The Cut described the book as “The Handmaid’s Tale for Gen Z”, comparing it to Margaret Atwood’s classic work of dystopian fiction.
In the US, the book is in such high demand that bookshops have struggled to keep it in stock. Last year, it sold 100,000 copies in the US alone.
It is a similar story in the UK. According to the Guardian, the book’s publisher, Vintage, sold 45,000 copies last year – an eleven-fold increase on its 2022 sales. Earlier this year, French publisher Stock decided to republish the book in response to increased demand.
On BookTok, the literary community of TikTok users, the novel is referred to as IWHNKM and has captured the attention of a new generation of readers interested in its themes of isolation, confinement and patriarchal oppression.
In a further boost to the book’s sales, it also appeared on Service95, a book club and website set up by singer Dua Lipa.
French-language bestseller in the 1990s
I Who Have Never Known Men was Harpman’s ninth novel and was originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes’.
At the time of its publication, the novel was widely read in France and Belgium and made the shortlist for the ‘Prix Femina’, a prestigious French literary prize.
It was Harpman’s first novel to be published in English. In the UK, it was originally published under a different title: The Mistress of Silence. Whether changing its title had an impact on the book's sales is a matter of debate.
The novel’s translator, Ros Schwartz, told the Guardian that she was "gobsmacked" by the book's recent success overseas. “I guess it just strikes a chord with the younger generation, which it didn’t at the time – and whether that’s to do with publicity or whether it’s completely random, I don’t know," she said. "That’s one of the wonderful things about publishing – you never know.”
A storied career
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek in 1929 to a family with Jewish roots. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, Harpman and her family fled to Morocco. They returned to Brussels in 1945, and she began studying medicine at ULB.
After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1948, Harpman was admitted to the university sanatorium in Eupen, where she was bed-bound for two years. It was during this time that she began writing fiction. Her first novel, Brève Arcadie, was published in 1959.
Harpman later trained as a psychologist, working for several years at the Fond’Roy clinic, before resuming her writing in the 1980s. Harpman died aged 82 in 2012.
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