A review of "I Who Have Never Known Men" by Jacqueline Harpman.
"As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."
A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.
The youngest of forty-a child with no name and no past-she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden-in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights-she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.
Then everything changes... and nothing changes.
A young woman who has never known men-a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints-must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.