an unsettling journey through an unexplained post apocalyptic world, where forty women are caged together in an underground jail, with no contact with the outside world -- including, as said by the title, men. among the older women who still hold memories of their normal lives, harpman uses a young narrator who was caged in at such an age where her normal life is the cage. 

'child', as the narrator is called, as she was too young to know her own name when they were imprisoned, acts as a tool to explore the extent to which human instinct is learned, with a specific focus on connecting and interacting with others. 'child', at her core, is always the odd one out. she is the youngest of those in the cage, the only one without a name, without memories of the sky, of families, of jobs, of, of course, men, and her frustration is palpable when the other women are reluctant to tell her. she feels left out, angry at the explanation that she doesn't need to know things she won't need, standing by her belief that knowing things for the sake of knowing is sometimes good enough. this theme connects with all the events of the novel -- child's desire to know, know about Before, know about civilisation, the way people lived before her, as though knowing these things may finally bring her closer to the rest of the world -- or at least the rest of the world that there used to be, because the world she lives in is empty. 

child is aware that she has no need to reproduce, to know about time, about making love, about children, about men, but still, she asks, she explores, she sits by the jail bars and stares at the young guard in the hopes it'll make him react, she uses her own heartbeat to become a 'clock' for the other women, she touches her own genitalia and sees if maybe she can get a reaction out of her body that appears to have adapted to the lack of a society. 

but still, she is different -- namely, through her feelings towards death. her ability to detach herself in the mercy stabbings of the women as they grow old is a factor which continuously separates her from the others, until one by one they all die, and she is left alone. 

she assumes this loneliness means freedom, but as she navigates the world without her co-captives, she uses the experiences that they had given her -- she reads canned food the way they had taught her to read, she uses mathematics to calculate distances the way they had taught her to calculate time, she, most strikingly, performs funereal ceremonies for those she finds dead in their cabins, while at the beginning she has no understanding of any kind of ceremony. and while she navigates this world, while she claims to feel happy and thrilled at her freedom, there is one thing that she searches for -- civilisation. but child is alone in this world, alone except for her own reflection, the last person in the world, who writes her story in the hopes that someone will one day find it, even after she has died, and would therefore mean she was never alone.

a beautiful, emotional book. i just wish it was longer!!