Tag: BookTok

This article first appeared in Book Gossip, a newsletter about what we’re reading and what we actually think about it. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month.

The latest BookTok success story isn’t romantasy, monster smut, or the long-awaited Onyx Storm, but a 160-page novel translated from French that was barely read when it first appeared in 1995. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is narrated by a girl who’s been raised in captivity with 39 other women in a cage underground, where they’re constantly monitored by a group of male guards. They have no memory of how they got there. When the women miraculously escape, they find a grassy plain denuded of all life, on a planet that might not even be Earth. As the tribe forges their own meager civilization, the narrator slowly reconciles herself to the fact that, as the youngest among them, she will be the last of her cohort to survive. Possibly — she has no way of knowing for sure — her death will mean the end of all humanity. Booksellers can barely keep the book in stock.

Since its re-release in 2022, and especially since the election, countless TikTok reviewers have recommended I Who Have Never Known Men as a “book that will change your life.” It has more than 138,000 ratings on Goodreads — with an average of four stars, while many literary novels are lucky to eke out three — it sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. last year.

No one quite knows how it happened. A few years after it was originally published in Belgium, a U.K. publishing house called Harvill commissioned an English translation of the book and titled it The Mistress of Silence; 20 years on, it was only available as a print-on-demand title, selling one to three copies per year. In 2018, an employee at Vintage U.K., which had subsumed Harvill, dusted off an old copy they’d found on a shelf in the office and brought it to the attention of the editors. Donald Trump was two years into his first presidency, The Handmaid’s Tale was back on best-seller lists, and the idea of a dystopian book about women seemed like a fairly safe bet. The translator, Ros Schwartz, was eager to revisit her earlier work, and Sophie Mackintosh, who’d just been Booker-longlisted for her dystopian feminist-revenge fantasy, The Water Cure, agreed to write an afterword. Anna Morrison created a sleek, slightly menacing cover. Perhaps most important, the title was changed to the enigmatic I Who Have Never Known Men, a more literal translation of the book’s French title Moi Qui N’ai Pas Connu Les Hommes.  

Not long after, Transit Press, a small nonprofit publisher in Oakland, California, bought the U.S. rights and published its edition with a vibrant green cover. “It sold what you would expect for a Belgian book in translation that came out 30 years ago,” says Transit publisher Adam Z. Levy, which is to say, a couple thousand copies. A year later, monthly sales began to pick up, starting at 2,000 that June, then doubling or tripling from month to month until it sold 100,000 copies in 2024. By way of comparison, the press’s most popular titles — mostly high literary fiction in translation — tend to sell in the low thousands. The book’s exponential sales growth initially flummoxed Transit, which sometimes struggles to print enough copies to keep up with demand. Still, Levy admits, it’s a good problem to have.

There doesn’t seem to be one big bookfluencer who started it all, but confluence of like-minded readers from the U.S. and the U.K. @bigbooklady recommended it to her 318,000 followers in honor of Women in Translation Month a couple Augusts ago. Another TikToker interrupted her usual hairstyling content to post an effusive review of the book. “If I had to summarize this book, I’d say it’s so fucked up but so beautiful,” she said. “If you want to rethink your entire life and find a newfound appreciation for living, I recommend.” Malissa, who posts on TikTok as @bewareofpity, knew she would have to review the book after receiving so many comments and messages about it. “My favorite aspect was the importance of community and support among the women,” she told me. “They only take action once they start communicating with one another, and they’re able to design a self-sufficient community by sharing ideas and knowledge.” Her favorite line in the book is a short one: “Talking is existing.”

Bookstores have also helped nurture the book’s steady sales growth, though Levy says they’ve learned about the book from customers, rather than the other way around. Jack Kyono, who manages McNally Jackson’s Prince Street location in New York, says the store’s employees got so many requests for I Who Have Never Known Men that it moved from Dutch and Belgian Literature in Translation (“an unjustly undershopped section”) to Customer Favorites. He attributes the book’s success not just to BookTok but to the rising popularity of dystopian fiction and fiction by women in translation, which has gained traction since the blogger Meytal Radzinski called for a Women in Translation Month back in 2014. Plus, the title is just fun to say. “Maybe funky syntax is the key to a sleeper hit,” Kyono says. “I love the way it sounds at the register when customers ask ‘Do you have I Who Have Never Known Men?’”

Not to paint with too broad a brush here, but I was initially surprised that the BookTok girlies had taken up an obscure literary title, since their tastes tend to run more to romance, romantasy, and generic women’s fiction. It’s tempting to see the book’s appeal as ideologically linked to the 4B movement, a feminist ethos that rejects relationships with men, and which briefly trended online after the November election. (One TikToker recommended reading I Who Have Never Known Men alongside Civil Disobedience, by Hannah Arendt; Race and Reunion, by David W. Blight; and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, by Angela Y. Davis to make sense of Trump’s win.) But the women in the novel are not separatists; their all-female society is the result of imprisonment and oppression. While some of them eventually couple up, the narrator seems to hint that this is because they’re making the best of what they’ve got. Instead, what I found the most compelling was the narrator’s journey from extreme naïveté to profound intellectual curiosity. Maybe the BookTokers, like me, were drawn in by this thought experiment: How, the book asks, would one make sense of existence if concepts like time, written language, and the bonds of friendship and family all had to be learned in a vacuum, slowly, over the course of a mostly solitary lifetime? Reading I Who Have Never Known Men forces the reader to contemplate what an immense privilege it is to be able to read books at all, not to mention eat food that doesn’t come from cans.

In the coming year, both the book’s U.S. and U.K. publishers will offer it in giftable hardcover for the first time, prompted by the phenomenon they’ve seen of customers buying four or five copies at a time to give to their friends. Transit’s hardcover will be timed to the winter holidays, while Vintage’s will come out in the summer. “It will be suitably special,” says Vintage Classics’s publishing director Nick Skidmore, “and we’re mindful of publishing a book that thanks the BookTok community for their support.” What he’s learned from the long road that led to I Who Have Never Known Men’s popularity, he says, is to never take for granted that the best books will surface and stay surfaced. “Seeing reading as a communal — rather than insular — act can, for books, be a matter of their life over death.”