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

‘Magnificent… a captivating autobiographical novel’ Elle

‘A tour de force’ Le Figaro

‘Haunting, spell-binding, luminous’ Lire

Publisher Review

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 A tour de force * Le Figaro * Haunting, spell-binding, luminous * Lire * An incandescent writer * Les Echos * Magnificent... a captivating autobiographical novel * Elle * A deeply personal exploration of cultural and personal identity, sexuality and belonging. Raw and sensual, readers will be enraptured by the narrator's intense evocations of guilt, desire and longing * Scotsman *