I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman
My goodness. Welcome to the bleakest novel ever written. I thought I was well versed in the bleak: being a fan of miserable Russian classics, grim ol' Cormac McCarthy, and dystopian nightmares like 'We' and 'The Handmaid's Tale', but none of these come close to the dark, hopeless futility of Harpman's classic. I felt like I was trapped in the background of a lost Salvador Dali painting, i.e. a world that made no sense, in which the Holocaust was forever on repeat, and the bewildered 'but why?' constantly on the lips of the characters and reader is met only by…
Al2 February 2026