All Men Want to Know

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'Magnificent... a captivating autobiographical novel' Elle

'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.

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 was 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.

'A tour de force' Le Figaro

'Haunting, spell-binding, luminous' Lire

'An incandescent writer' Les Echos