Throughout the experience of reading this book, I knew it would become a new favorite for me in all of its profundity and questions of existentialism. It’s phenomenal, truly something that will leave lingering remnants of its impact behind. In a fictional world that feels speculative and, on the one hand, wholly dystopian, something so deeply human is engrained within these pages. It is, at its core, a story of humanity and its ability and desire to persevere. We are exposed to the darkest cruelty that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other, to its depravity in the inexplicable incarceration of others, but also to its tenderness, to the smallest, most trivial pieces of mundane “life” that make us all who we are. As articulated in Sophie Mackintosh’s Afterword, “How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?” (170). These are the deeply philosophical questions Harpman’s work leads us towards, especially through the characterization of our narrator and how she relates to the women that surround her, deeply affected by memory of their own pasts which our narrator does not possess. It is an incredible book that I think cannot be divorced from the author’s own history as a Jewish woman forced to flee Nazi occupation, which holds echoes in the women’s own captivity and its senselessness. But there still exists some semblance of hope, even in the face of such cruelty.