All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
In All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui recounts her idyllic upbringing in Algeria, an untamed paradise where she spent hazy summer afternoons swimming, diving, and travelling through the desert. Her father is Algerian, and her mother is French. When racial tensions start to rise in their neighbourhood, her mother experiences a horrifying act of violence that compels the family to leave the country.
All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
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18-year-old Nina lives alone in Paris. The 1980s are here. She travels to The Kat, a renowned gay nightclub, four evenings a week where she observes ladies from the sidelines out of fear for her own impulses and her startling and seductive freedom. In her alone setting, she begins to write and soon discovers that she is writing about her mother.
The international hit All Men Want to Know is a melancholy, lyrical story about mothers and daughters, sexuality and shame, and living in the middle of two cultures yet not quite belonging to either. This iconic portrayal of femininity by one of Europe’s best-living writers has become a phenomenon in France. This book, a publishing sensation in continental Europe, is a dreamlike, disjointed account of Bouraoui’s coming-of-age as a French-Algerian gay woman.
