We Were Forbidden

By: Jacqueline Harpman

Published by Transit Books, 2026-07-07

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 instinct: defiance.

In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.

Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe--her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.

Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice-weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

These novellas--the first work by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades--reveal her incredible stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice.