First published in 1995 then virtually forgotten, a bleak tale of women caged by men has been embraced as a gen Z Handmaid’s Tale

Two people a year, or maybe three, used to buy Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men. Her story of a girl locked in a cage with 39 women in an underground bunker on a nameless world was published in 1995 then slid into obscurity.

Something has changed since then, because the novel’s tale of sisterhood and survival has become one of the hottest reads this year, drawing comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia E Butler’s Parable series of novels.