I Who Have Never Known Men: the lost dystopia finding new readers after buzz on TikTok

Two people a year, or maybe three, used to buy Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men. Her story of a girl locked in a cage with 39 women in an underground bunker on a nameless world was published in 1995 then slid into obscurity.

Something has changed since then, because the novel’s tale of sisterhood and survival has become one of the hottest reads this year, drawing comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia E Butler’s Parable series of novels.

IWHNKM, as it is known in hashtags on BookTok, the ­community of TikTok users who have made ­reading cool again, is in such demand that bookshops in the US have ­struggled to keep it in stock.

In the UK it has become “a bestselling staple of fiction sections across our bookshops”, according to Waterstones’ head of books, Bea Carvalho. Its publisher, Vintage, which reissued the novel in 2019, sold 45,000 copies last year, an elevenfold rise on 2022.

The novel has also appeared on the must-read lists of Service95, a newsletter, book club and website set up by Dua Lipa, one of a growing group of celebrities in music and fashion using their clout to support literature.

“It’s described as speculative fiction/sci-fi, but it’s quite desolate in its writing in a way I haven’t found with other books,” said Hali Brown, who runs the Books on the Bedside TikTok account with her sister Hana.

The narrator is the youngest of 40 captives and too young to remember her past. “All the guards are men,” Brown said, “and that’s all the women know about gender. They never really understand why they are there or how long they would be kept for.” Or any sense of time at all.

They may be on Earth. They may discover the reasons why they are there. They may find other people. Or they may not.

“It’s quite bleak but incredibly ­powerful,” Brown added. “It was unbelievably gripping for something so desperate.”

Rather like the questions posed by the post-apocalyptic novel, there are few clear answers to why it has become so successful. Harpman was a Belgian writer who died in 2012 aged 82. Her family fled to Casablanca during the second world war in fear of persecution for their Jewish roots.

The novel’s translator, Ros Schwartz, said she was ­gobsmacked by the turnaround of the book’s fortunes. “I guess it just strikes a chord with the younger generation, which it didn’t at the time – and whether that’s to do with ­publicity or whether it’s completely random, I don’t know. That’s one of the wonderful things about publishing – you never know.”

Brown lists the book’s qualities as being “accessibly written” and “not very long” (about 200 pages), as well as resonating with the modern ­political context of attacks on ­women’s rights and diversity at work.

“There’s lots happening in terms of women feeling like things are going backwards and not really ­understanding why or how that’s able to happen,” she said. The ­politics of Harpman’s world are sparse, unlike other dystopian fiction such as The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games. “Its political understanding of the world, I think, is relatable to a lot of young women,” Brown added.

Perhaps another reason for the book’s success second time round is that Schwartz revised her ­translation with the benefit of two decades’ more experience as a translator, with works including a fresh version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and honours such as becoming a chevalier in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Schwartz’s first attempt in the mid-90s used words that were often ­similar to their French counterparts. The effect of the more direct ­translation was to make the ­narrator seem too erudite for a young girl kept in a cage without education and no ability to read or write. “So I went through it and got rid of all the Latinate ­language. It was about ­finding the right voice for the ­narrator that didn’t make her sound over-­educated but without making her sound stupid or a caricature.”

Another factor may be a title change. Nick Skidmore, publishing director at Vintage, said the book was originally published in ­translation as The Mysteries of Silence, rather than the French title, Moi Qui N’ai Pas Connu Les Hommes.

“A colleague of mine found this book at the time when Trump was in [his first term] and The Handmaid’s Tale was back in the bestsellers’ list. So we read it and we were ­mesmerised by it,” Skidmore said. The book was print-on-demand, selling only “two or three a year”.

Switching titles to a more direct translation of the French may be “one of the markers of its success”, he added. “I think the book captures this sense of the world where ­people are feeling bewildered. It’s a ­profoundly existential book, like some of the classics resonating with gen Z right now – Dostoevsky’s White Nights, for example. The type of stories that engage with very weighty ­questions of our existence.”

Related: Fyodor fever: how Dostoevsky became a social media sensation

Susan Watkins, professor of women’s writing at Leeds Beckett University, said that dystopian fiction was often popular because it allowed readers to “identify with someone who’s resisting the totalitarian or authoritarian world in which they’re placed”.

Another factor in the appeal of dystopian fiction, Watkins said, is the process of “cognitive estrangement”, a term used by critic Darko Suvin to describe how science fiction writers create unfamiliarity in an invented world so they can examine a social or cultural change in the present day.

“For readers who perceive the threats to women’s reproductive rights and their sexual liberty, and the idea that feminism is being curtailed in large parts of the world, they’re seeing something of that in the text.”