Description

‘Intense, gorgeous, troubling, seductive – a novel that has to be surrendered to rather than read’ Sarah Waters

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN TRANSLATES AWARD

All Men Want to Know traces Nina Bouraoui’s blissful childhood in Algeria, a wild, sun-soaked paradise, with hazy summer afternoons spent swimming, diving, and driving across the desert. Her mother is French, her father Algerian; when racial tensions begin to surface in their neighbourhood, her mother suffers an unspeakable act of violence that forces the family to flee the country.

In Paris, eighteen-year-old Nina lives alone. It’s the 1980s. Four nights a week she makes her way to The Kat, a legendary gay nightclub, where she watches women from the sidelines, afraid of her own desires, her sudden and intoxicating freedom. In her solitude, she starts to write – and finds herself writing about her mother.

All Men Want to Know is a haunting, lyrical international bestseller about mothers and daughters, about shame and sexuality, about existing between two cultures and belonging to neither. A phenomenon in France, this is a defining portrait of womanhood from one of Europe’s greatest living writers.

‘Blown away by the power and lyricism of All Men Want to Know. What a book. Read it’ Niven Govinden, author of THIS BRUTAL HOUSE

‘Intense yet gorgeous and deeply moving, All Men Want to Know is a defining portrait of womanhood that grips at the heart of the immigrant experience, about existing between two cultures yet belonging to neither’ Dazed

‘It’s easy to see why this novel dominated the bestseller charts for so long in France’ Monocle

Publisher Review

An incandescent writer * Les Echos * A tour de force * Le Figaro * Intense, gorgeous, troubling, seductive – a novel that has to be surrendered to rather than read — Sarah Waters, Booker-shortlisted author of Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Haunting, spell-binding, luminous * Lire * A vital book for our times… Nina’s story will touch any reader who has ever felt lost or out of place, or who has ever yearned to love and be loved * European Literature Network * Magnificent… a captivating autobiographical novel * Elle *