I who have never known men

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN opens with an elderly woman looking back on her life. Standard fare for a novel, but what we see of her past is far from usual: she takes back to when she is a young girl, where she is imprisoned in a cage underground with 39 other women. ‘I love this book; I love its implacable calmness, its unwillingness to give its secrets away. It’s a puzzle that cannot be solved, isn’t supposed to be solved, because it is in the process of grappling with it that we discover the point for ourselves. Every time I have read the novel has been prismatic, opening up reflections on cruelty, on human nature, on capitalism. Reading it is not a passive experience but one that provokes, that exasperates, that moves.’ Sophie Mackintosh