Latest news with #JacquelineHarpman
Daily Mail
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Which 3 books leave Reeta Chakrabarti cold?
What Book ... ... are you reading now? I HAVE just finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which is one of the most extraordinary novels I've ever read. It was published in the mid-1990s, but is now being rediscovered – my daughter and her friend read it, and passed it on to me. Thirty-nine women and one female child live in a cage for as long as the child can remember, kept imprisoned by male guards. One day there is a sudden commotion and the men flee, leaving the cage open. What ensues is devastating and impenetrable. I hope someone explains it to me one day. ...would you take to a desert island? Impossible to imagine having only one book, but given that I would at last have the luxury of many hours with nothing to do, let me cheat and take a series. Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time is a 12-parter – I got halfway through it some years back. When I was much younger and more energetic I also got halfway through Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. I can see a theme emerging here, to do with time and halfway through. ...first gave you the reading bug? Like all children of my vintage, I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Louisa May Alcott. But the first 'proper' book was Jane Eyre, which fell into my hands when I was eight, probably because Bronte was next to Blyton in the library. I don't know what I made of the romance or of the mad woman in the attic, but I was gripped by the cruelty meted out to young Jane by her cold-hearted aunt, and the deprivations she suffers at Lowood school. I have been a reader ever since. ... left you cold? I HAVE never got beyond the first page of Moby Dick. I am assured that a treat awaits me if I persevere, so one day perhaps I will. I struggle with Virginia Woolf and feel guilty, as she's the sort of author I ought to like in principle. I am a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro but had to plod my way through The Buried Giant. And while I read Ulysses once for my literature degree, I am very unlikely ever to pick it up again. (I hope my husband doesn't see this, he loves it…)
CBC
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How a '90s Belgian sci-fi novel found success on TikTok
A book that was relatively obscure until recently has now become a bestseller thanks to TikTok. It's a translation of I Who Have Never Known Men, a 1995 novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman. Originally written in French, the dystopian novel is under 200 pages long. It went from selling two or three copies a year in the U.K., to over 150,000 in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. in the last year. Today on Commotion, The Cut's Emily Gould tells host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about the sudden popularity of I Who Have Never Known Men. WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube (this segment begins at 14:28):
