neha bulbul

It's sheer magic of literature,when you read a book written by someone born hundreds of years ago and you find her more relatable than most of the people around you. "The world the liberated women walk through seems desolate, dotted from time to time with trees, rivers and nightmare bunkers just like the one they have escaped from". These are the lines from the introduction of the book I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman . The story is about forty women imprisoned in a deep underground cage and story is narrated from the point of view of unnamed youngest prisoner.All the other thirty nine women have lived normal life before prison and they have vague memory about their previous life but our narrator only knew the life inside the underground bunker.And one fine day a siren goes off and all of them were free only to later realise the bizarrenes of their surroundings.The story is about despair, perseverance and most importantly dignity that is being maintained by our protagonist in the face of unfathomable situations both in life and death. Although after reading the novel I had a sense of melancholy but this book totally worked for me.

The book took me into rollacoaster of feelings.The characters in the book seems so real,full of love , compassion,envy ,wrath still very human.