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If you enjoy wondering if you’ll ever feel hope again, this book's for you. I Who Have Never Known Men makes The Road by Cormac McCarthy feel like a stroll in a park. The premise is straightforward enough. 40 women, caged in a bunker for reasons no one’s sharing.

This isn’t the kind of book that’s here to comfort. It’s dark, bleak, terrifying, yet also profound. It made me sit in discomfort and confront survival, freedom, and what it even means to live.

The silence about what happened to the world is louder than any dystopian world-building ever could be. And at first, I wanted the explanations, the “why,�� the rules of this world. But the more I read, the more I realised that the silence is the whole point of the story.

If you’re on the hunt for a happily ever after, you might want to look elsewhere, because this book doesn’t do redemption or catharsis or answers. What we do get is a meditation on what’s left when everything we think makes us human such as love, connection and hope, is stripped away.

By the time I turned the last page, I was left reeling and grappling with the enormity of my own insignificance. It’s frustrating, haunting and unforgettable.

Highly recommend if you’re a masochistic reader, like me.

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Sometimes I swing from fantasy to soul-crushing dystopian books to keep me grounded.