Margins
We Were Forbidden
2026
First Published
3.90
Average Rating
160
Number of Pages

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiancé. Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths. As part of her rigid shcooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe – her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportiante. Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own. In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape? BRIEF classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Avg Rating
3.90
Number of Ratings
21
5 STARS
14%
4 STARS
62%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Jacqueline Harpman
Jacqueline Harpman
Author · 9 books
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. Being half Jewish, the family moved to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and returned home after the war. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her medical studies when she contracted tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. She had given up writing after her fourth book was published, and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. She has now written twelve novels and won several literary prizes, most recently the Médicis for the present novel. She is married to an architect and has two children.
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