Berk Worms Book Club: Dystopian month

Welcome to the Berk Worms Book Club🐛 2025. Each month we all read the same book that we have chosen from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it as well as other books we are reading.

For September 2025, we have chosen to read a Dystopian novel. Our chosen novel is entitled: ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ written by Jacqueline Hartman and Sophie Mcintosh. This novel was published In 2019 and is approximately 198 pages. It is available in all formats and the paperback costs about £7 .

About the Novel:

Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world.

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 an 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.

Critical views:

‘A novel that takes you into philosophically interesting territory… this [is a] intriguingly dark thought experiment told by a compellingly alien voice – dispassionate and unfussy – is strangely fascinating’ ― The Times

Reading ahead with the BERKWORMS

14 October: we are reading a book about a different culture called The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza