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  • Published: 3 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241447734
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $26.00

All Men Want to Know

'Intense, gorgeous, troubling, seductive' SARAH WATERS




A haunting, lyrical French bestseller set in Paris and Algiers about desire, shame and violence

In All Men Want to Know the author traces her blissful childhood in Algeria, a sun-soaked paradise, recalling long trips across the desert with her mother and sister and hazy summer afternoons spent on the beach with her friend Ali. But Nina's mother is French - moving to Algeria for love at a time when most Europeans were desperate to leave - and as civil war approaches, their sunny idyll gives way to increasingly hostile and violent outbreaks. When something unspeakable happens to her mother, the family flee to Paris.

In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou. She sits alone at the bar, afraid of her own desires, of her sudden and intoxicating freedom. There she meets the glamorous, deeply troubled Ely, her volatile friends Lizz and Laurence, and the beautiful Julia, with whom she falls desperately in love. And, most importantly, she starts to write.

  • Published: 3 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241447734
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $26.00

Praise for All Men Want to Know

A tour de force

Le Figaro

Haunting, spell-binding, luminous

Lire

An incandescent writer

Les Echos

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

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