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: one post teasing its plot attracted 12.5m views and more than 2m likes. British readers bought 1,400 copies in 2019; they snapped up 75,000 in 2025, an increase of more than 5,250%. The novel reached fifth place on the Washington Post's paperback bestseller chart.
Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets.