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I Who Have Never Known Men

Deluxe Edition

It is a novel about community, loneliness, and solitude, about intellectual awakening in impossible situations. It asks... What does it mean to be alive, to learn, to know?

A novel that takes you into philosophically interesting territory… this [is a] intriguingly dark thought experiment told by a compellingly alien voice – dispassionate and unfussy – is strangely fascinating

A vivid evocation of another world, alive with hope and dignity

Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

A bleak but fascinating postapocalyptic novel… all the loneliness and oblivion of a deserted world won't stop us from following the narrator as far as she can go

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, now available in a beautiful hardback gift edition. 
 
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 
 
Discover the reader obsession of 2025 
 
**Orlanda, the next sensation from Jacquline Harpman, is available now**

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A forthcoming Vintage Classics publication brought to you by Penguin Random House, on sale July 2026

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human instinct: defiance. 
 
Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths. 
 
As part of her rigid shcooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe – her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportiante. 
 
Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own. 
 
In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape? 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Jacqueline Harpman

Ros Schwartz

'THE ’90S GENDER SWAP NOVEL YOU NEED TO READ NOW' (NEW YORK TIMES), FROM THE AUTHOR OF 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. 
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READER REVIEWS - JOIN THE ORLANDA OBSESSION: 
'Hilarious, life affirming, haunting…truly perfect in prose, plot, and concept. Just wow' 
'A powerful novel, witty, wicked and teasing' 
'It’s the perfect book' 
'This is the second book I've read by her and it's another masterpiece' 
'Reading this has confirmed Jacqueline Harpman as one of my favourite writers I’ve ever encountered'

Jacqueline Harpman

Books by Jacqueline Harpman

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The classics making waves on TikTok

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

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