I Who Have Never Known Men

A little known dystopian novel when it was published in the mid-90’s, this is now a rediscovered gem. Forty women are imprisoned in an underground bunker. They don’t know where they are, how they got here, what their captors want. They are given food and clothing but are never spoken to by the guards. They have no sense of time. One of them, the narrator, was only a little child when she was taken; could have been a mistake. As she becomes an adult in the bunker, having no knowledge or memories of any other life, she finds that she is quite different from the others. This book is truly bleak but I could not stop reading.