I Who Have Never Known Men is short, strange, deeply unsettling, and somehow far larger than its page count suggests. I loved it, though loved feels like an odd word to use for a book so often deprived of any obvious comfort.

The novel follows a young woman who has spent most of her life imprisoned underground in a cage with thirty-nine other women. None of them know why they are there, who put them there, what has happened outside, or whether outside even still exists in any meaningful way. The women are watched by male guards. They are fed, monitored, and kept alive, but never given an explanation. The narrator is the youngest of the group, and because she was taken so early she has no real memory of the world before captivity. She who has never known men, society, childhood, love, history, or the ordinary scaffolding by which most people come to understand themselves.

That is probably all the plot you need, though the book does move beyond that initial premise. What makes it so powerful is not simply the horror of the situation, but the way Harpman refuses to turn it into something easier. This is not really a thriller, despite the obvious questions it raises. It is not especially interested in providing the satisfaction of explanation. There is mystery, but the mystery is not the point in the usual sense. The book is far more interested in what a person becomes when all inherited structures are removed. What remains of identity when there is no family, no nation, no future, no romance, no God, no work, no culture, no one even able to confirm the shape of the world as it used to be?

The narrator’s voice is what makes the book work so well. She is observant but not sentimental, innocent in some ways but never naïve in the soft, decorative sense. Her ignorance is not stupidity; it is simply the result of having been denied the conditions from which knowledge usually grows. She has to reason her way towards everything. Bodies, power, ageing, shame, sex, death, freedom — all of these arrive to her not as normal facts of life, but as ideas to be studied from a distance, often without the emotional vocabulary we would expect. That distance is unsettling, because it makes familiar things feel suddenly arbitrary. So much of what we consider natural is revealed to be taught, repeated, absorbed.

The book is often described as dystopian, which is true enough, but also slightly inadequate. Dystopia usually suggests a system, and part of the terror here is the absence of one. There are no slogans, no elaborate political architecture, and no grand explanation of what has gone wrong. The women are trapped inside an event whose causes are permanently withheld from them, and therefore from us. In that sense the novel feels less like speculative fiction about a possible future and more like a distilled version of existence itself; you wake up somewhere you did not choose, under rules you did not make, surrounded by people who know only slightly more than you do, and you spend your life trying to build meaning from incomplete information.

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That sounds bleak, and it is, but the book is not empty. There is something strangely moving about the narrator’s persistence. Not hopeful exactly, hope feels too warm a word for the atmosphere Harpman creates. It is more like continuation. The bare fact of going on. The human impulse to record, to understand, to arrange experience into some kind of order even when order may not exist. The novel asks whether meaning has to be discovered, or whether the act of noticing is already enough.

My only real criticism of this book would be that it was hard to put down, and not in the usual complimentary way. The lack of chapters means you have to choose your own moment to stop, which feels a bit like walking blindly into traffic. Your decision is largely arbitrary. Sometimes you get lucky and stop around a minor shift in direction, other times you pick the book back up and realise you abandoned it in the middle of something, and have to read back slightly to recover the energy and momentum the book expected you to carry through that moment.

That said, I also think this irritation is part of the effect. The absence of chapters makes the book feel longer than it is, but in a good way. It creates a low, constant pressure. You cannot comfortably step out of it. You are kept in motion, always slightly on edge, denied the neat relief of a break. It mirrors the narrator’s own condition; time continues, but without the usual markers to provide it structure to make it manageable.

The ending worked for me in its mystery. I did not need everything explained, and I think any attempt to answer the central questions too neatly would have made the book smaller. The final sentences themselves felt abrupt, perhaps more abrupt than I wanted, but maybe that is fitting too. A book so concerned with the limits of knowledge was never going to offer the comfort of a graceful exit.

It is rare to read something this sparse and still feel it expanding days later. I Who Have Never Known Men is disturbing, intelligent, and oddly beautiful. It gives you very little, and somehow leaves you with almost too much.

For more regular reading updates, shorter thoughts, and proof that I buy books faster than I read them, follow me on Instagram @adamkhanco.