There’s a trade paperback currently on the bestseller list you may have noticed. Or maybe you haven’t.
This slim novel is a 30-year-old work of speculative fiction by a now-deceased Belgian author that’s been translated into English from the original French. The current edition came out in 2022.
And it’s a publishing juggernaut.
The late Jacqueline Harpman’s “I Who Have Never Known Men,” translated by Ros Schwartz, tells a dystopian story of 40 women held captive in an underground bunker. The novel is narrated by the youngest prisoner, who has questions that neither the guards nor her fellow inmates will answer, including about the worrying, unknown world looming outside.
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While its austere narrative allows ample room for interpretation, the steady success of “I Who Have Never Known Men” offers its own compelling mystery. And after finally picking it up and reading it, I had questions.
So, I reached out to the publisher of Berkeley’s Transit Press, Adam Z. Levy, to ask him about the novel.
“It’s been a slow acceleration since we first published the book in 2022,” he explains, estimating the book sold about 2,500 copies in its first year, fueled by a review from Deborah Eisenberg in the New York Review of Books. “But then, nothing much happened.”
That all began to change the following year – and then, the year after that.
“It sold out. We did a reprint of another 2,000, and then quickly did another reprint,” he says. “We just couldn’t anticipate that it would accelerate on the sales side. It sold about 8,000 copies that year.
“The next year, in 2024, it sold about 100,000 copies. And then in the first, like, three months of 2025, it sold about another 100,000 copies,” he says, offering a rough calculation of the current figure. “It’s sold a little over 400,000 copies.”
For a small independent publisher like Transit Books, that’s huge. (And what would those numbers be for a Big 5 publishing house? Also, huge.)
Levy in part cites the influence of TikTok’s #BookTok community, a phenomenon he discussed with novelist Emily Gould in January.
But online influence doesn’t explain everything, he says.
“That initial surge, I think, was largely a result of people finding it from #BookTok, which is a big driver of sales, especially for commercial books. I think this is somewhat of an outlier for #BookTok books in terms of its subject matter, focus, literary style. It’s a super literary book,” he says. “It doesn’t provide easy answers.”
Levy says the novel appears to be following its own demographic progress, from initial publication to its online surge and now a word-of-mouth movement reaching older readers who aren’t on TikTok. (There’s a U.K. edition published by Vintage, which predates Transit’s, also attracting readers.)
“There’s the driver from online sales, and that in turn caused a lot of readers who otherwise wouldn’t have found out about it to pick it up, read it and recommend it to friends,” he says. “So bookstores that weren’t necessarily carrying it when it first came out are now picking it up, selling out, ordering more.
“We’re also seeing a generational movement, too. Where initially it was really popular among Gen Z, but now we’re seeing drift back upward to their parents – the kids are recommending it to them – and then back down.”
He says there have been sales spikes around current events, as well.
“We did see a big surge in sales around the time of the presidential election, and we also saw a rise in popularity after the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” he says.
Interestingly, despite its impressive sales, the book remains in stealth mode in some parts of the book world. A small informal poll of smart, informed booksellers drew responses ranging from enthusiastic recommendations to total unfamiliarity.
Here are a few responses:
At Book Soup in West Hollywood, a staff recommendation by bookseller Ryan calls it: “A Lonely Book, A Miracle Book, It Is Science Fiction, It’s Surrealist, It’s Dystopic, It’s Apocalyptic, It’s Poignant and Beautiful, It’s Frightening, It’s Real, It’s Weird, It’s a Gorgeous, Gorgeous Tale Of A Woman Coming Of Age, Finding Community, a Tribe, and then the Years Pass On,” before adding that it’s recommended if you like “existential grief.”
Allison Glasgow, director for McNally Jackson in New York City, says via email, “We have multiple booksellers at McNally Jackson who have read and loved the book and feature it regularly on our bestseller, staff pick, and customer favorites displays. Our staff pick display is a sales driver for this title and keeps it regularly on our Monthly Bestseller list.”
(McNally Jackson’s list, which is often highlighted on Transit Books’ Instagram, is a big reason I began to notice the book’s staying power.)
Max Howard, from McNally Jackson’s Seaport location, described the book in a staff pick: “Like David Markson’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’ or Guido Morselli’s ‘Dissipatio H.G.,’ Harpman here seeks answers to questions such as, ‘What would life be like, once completely devoid of community, culture, and care?’ Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t be great.”
Asked how readers are reacting to the book, Howard responded by email, “The sense I get from other readers is that there are as many interpretations and reactions to it as the number of folks checking it out. I haven’t yet found any sort of consensus.”
Readers, as noted, don’t seem to be in short supply. The Los Angeles Public Library currently has a six-month waiting list for the audiobook from its digital holdings (Pro tip: You can access it right now on hoopla digital.).
On Reddit, you’ll find posts by readers searching for someone with whom they can discuss the book, its themes and all the feelings it churns up.
One of the reasons it may be resonating, says Levy, could be due to the author’s experience as a Jewish woman whose family fled the Nazis, leaving Belgium for Casablanca. Harpman lost many family members in the Holocaust, he says, and was attuned to “absolutism” and “fascistic order.”
“I think that it speaks to some of that uncertainty that people feel now,” he says. “There are a lot of ways that you can imagine your world in this one.”
If the book seems unstoppable, it has some new competition: Itself.
Transit Books is publishing a hardcover collector’s edition with a new introduction by Carmen Maria Machado on Sept. 9 (though I’ve seen it in at least one store already).
Unlike most readers who are finding the book now, Machado has actually been a fan of the book for decades, says Levy.
“We reached out to her, like, ‘You might be interested in this; I don’t know if you know about this book,’ but she had actually found a copy of this book in like 1998, soon after its initial publication,” he says, relating a story she tells in the new introduction. “She found a copy in a church rummage sale.”
Still, with an incredible publishing success story like this, people must be asking him about it all the time.
“No. [laughs] It’d be cool if they were, but no,” he says. “I think because it falls outside of a lot of traditional publishing media, timing-wise.
“You do a big thing on a book when it comes out,” he says, “but there’s not really much for a book that slowly becomes a phenomenon.”