IT DOES NOT sound like the sort of book TikTok typically enjoys. “I Who Have Never Known Men” (“IWHNKM”) does not feature wolves, fairies or the word “rutting”. It is a desolate post-apocalyptic tale, not a racy coming-of-age story. Yet thanks to social media, the novel is a hit—30 years after it was first published.
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: they were captured during a war none of them remembers. When they finally escape, they find a “land that is almost dead”. Other bunkers are full of corpses. “Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this?” the narrator wonders.
Jacqueline Harpman was born into a Jewish family in Belgium in 1929 and “IWHNKM” evokes the horrors of Nazism. Her slim, sombre novel was published in French in 1995, then translated into English, before falling out of print. In 2019 it was reissued by Vintage, a British publisher, with a revised translation.
Word started spreading online—one viral post teasing the plot of “IWHNKM” has 12.5m views and more than 2m likes—and sales rose sharply. In 2019 British readers bought 1,400 copies of “IWHNKM”. They have snapped up 75,000 so far in 2025, an increase of more than 5,250%. The affecting novel is popular in America, too: it is in fifth place on the Washington Post’s paperback bestseller chart.
Nick Skidmore, publishing director of Vintage Classics, says the decision to republish the book in 2019 was prompted by the boom in interest in dystopian fiction that followed the election of Donald Trump. “This book is really all about bewilderment,” he says; it appeals to “readers who may feel an equal sense of bewilderment about the political landscape today”.
According to its fans, “IWHNKM” explores “what makes us human in a totally foreign world”. The narrator is “just like us”, one remarked: “We also don’t know all the answers to why things are the way they are, or what the meaning of life is.” Gen Z readers may enjoy shlocky romances—but they enjoy pondering questions of the self, society and freedom, too. ■
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