Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl – the fortieth prisoner – sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.
By Matty
Easily the best book I’ve read in 2024 and actually one of the best books I’ve ever read.
It’s a strange premise: a young, unnamed girl is kept in a cage underground with 39 other women, guarded by men who never speak to or look at them. No one knows why they’re there, how they got there or where they are. Some of the women have patchy memories of their lives before but the protagonist is too young to remember life before the cage.
The rest of the story I can’t talk about without terrible spoilers, but this short book manages to ask most of the important questions we face in our lives. Why do we live? Who are we without other people, without culture? Why do terrible things happen and what does it do to us when they do? Our moral understanding of the world, is that something we develop ourselves or does it come from our upbringings & communities? Does it matter really, in the end, what we do and how we live?
The book gives you no easy answers, it’s as mysterious and unknowable as life itself, there is no neat ending where all questions are answered, but it is nonetheless a beautiful, moving and affecting story which I cannot stop thinking about even months after I’ve read it. I think it’s also important to mention that Harpman was a holocaust survivor who fled Belgium at the start of the war and I feel it gives a different cast to the book to think about it in those terms.
I relentlessly recommend this to customers, mostly because I want to talk about it with people, and that’s worked! I’ve had quite a few come back to tell me how much they loved it too. My colleges have been roundly bullied into reading it and it says a lot that it’s on at least two top 5 books lists that I know about.
