All Men Want to Know

Author(s): Bouraoui, Nina
Binding: Paperback / softback
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Pagination: 192 pages
Dimensions (mm): 214 x 135 x 18
Weight (g): 206
Year of Publication: 2020
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN13/EAN/SKU: 9780241447727
Description: 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, 18-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 best seller 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.