An eye opening book that is well written and great characters.
Thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers for gifting me this book

Very thought provoking and beautifully written, Nina gives the reader a short glimpse into the life of a young student discovering her sexuality and her reason for being. There are many layers in the story, her feelings of being torn between being French and Algerian and the disparity between the two, the memories of a past life with her family that seem so distant, reflections on war and how the protagonist uses writing to comfort her with her most fragile destructive memories. Wedged in-between this narrative the reader also feels the struggles the character faces accepting that fact that she is gay. This book is very quotable and glorious in its exploration of human love and desires. 4.5 stars

I thought Nina’s writing style was rich, beautifully written, descriptive and fascinating. I enjoyed the book and getting an insight into her LGBT journey, her childhood, and what it was like growing up in a dual heritage household in both Algeria and France, as well as the challenges she faced in life - family, relationships, cultural, and sense of self and identity.

I did like what this did for the most part and liked the story and the way it progressed. The characters where done well and for the most part they were well rounded and written well. I enjoyed how it melded the discussion of sexulaity, race and personal identity all together

So, I'll start this review off by saying that I'm confused. I read this as a memoir, the blurb on the book led me to believe that...but I see others referring to it as either a novel or a "fictional autobiography." I'm reviewing this as the memoir I read it to be, but I gather that "auto-fiction" is typical of this author's style. I don't think it will influence my review, but it might be worth pointing out the ambiguity for other readers in case it influences their take on it.

I thought this was a really fascinating book. It is set partly in the Algeria of Nina's childhood, as civil war broke out, and partly in 80's Paris as Nina is discovering her sexuality and navigating the gay scene at that time. Both of these settings see Nina addressing issues of identity - as a French-Algerian born to a white mother and black father, Nina feels neither fully of an Algeria ridding itself of French rule, nor of a family that she is very aware of being "other" from in France. As a young, gay woman, Nina strikes up relationships and acquaintances with other women at a nightclub called the Katmandu, whilst facing her own homophobias and trying to feel comfortable in herself. The book also looks at her mother's experiences, of having a mixed-race marriage and how her family responded to that, and episodes of sexual abuse in both her early life and as the catalyst for the family fleeing Nigeria. Nina spends the book trying to know herself, and know about her place in the world.

I really enjoyed the writing in this book, and appreciated what I now suppose was the fictionalisation of certain aspects to create a really solid narrative. The writing is crisp, but still insightful. Neither timeline was grounded in a life experience or time in history that I know a lot about, and I am keen to read more of her books to explore this more.

Read in one sitting. A vivid novel that explores sexuality, race, and growing up across two differing cultures. Some really beautiful observations, expressed elegantly.

I enjoyed the book and getting an insight into her LGBT journey, her childhood, and what it was like growing up in a dual heritage household in both Algeria and France, as well as the challenges she faced in life - family, relationships, cultural, and sense of self and identity.

This novel is conveys the loose fluidity of memory, so accurate that it could only have come from truth. The book is split into three threads - Remembering, Knowing, and Becoming. As Nina enters the lesbian scene in 1980s Paris, she turns to writing to burrow away from her shame and fear. She finds herself cast back to the idyll of her childhood in Algeria, broken when her French mother was brutally attacked in their neighbourhood. As the undercurrents of violence in Algeria bubble audibly beneath the surface, so too does Nina’s homosexuality. As a child other-ed twice over, because of her French mother and her sexuality, she grapples with understanding how to belong to this newfound community of women. Her past is everywhere - she projects her mother onto Julia, the woman she is infatuated with; she looks back in fear at the men following her on dark Parisian streets and sees the teenage boy who, threatened by his mother’s beauty, slit her throat. This book captures the profound persistence of memory, and its haunting of our present as it shapes who we become. This is often painful - as her mother says to her, ‘You have to be able to accept it: life isn’t a dream, we aren’t here on this earth for a life of constant pleasure; it’s the difficult moments that matter, much more than the lighter moments.’

A gorgeous memoir about a dual heritage lesbian growing up between Algeria and France in the 1980s.

As a queer woman, I was fascinated to read the descriptions of lesbian clubs in Paris during this time. Bouraoui captures all the sexual tension, partner drama and awkwardness of the scene in such a detailed way that I felt like I was right there, hovering on the edge of the dancefloor with her.

These scenes were interwoven with her childhood in post-colonial Algeria, as the country moved slowly but brutally towards civil war. As a child, Bouraoui perceives the effects of life as a woman in this country through her mother — a French woman who moved to the country with her Algerian husband. We watch her this woman slowly become unable to withstand the street harassment and attacks that she is subjected to.

A fascinating, beautifully told story that transports you through the various eras of Bouraoui's youth. I highly recommend this book.

Caught in a void between her father's Algerian heritage and her mother's world of France, Nina struggles to find her identity.

With her childhood split between the idyllic countryside of post-colonial Algeria and time with her grandparents in France, the younger Nina feels she doesn't belong to either. With her father largely absent, her mother is a foreigner in Algeria, and with resentment of the former French rule bubbling below the surface, an unease of a constant but undefined threat persists within the family. And yet for the formative Nina, time spent with her maternal grandparents in France also brings a feeling of alienation.

At the age of eighteen, Nina finds herself in Paris, again feeling as though she is an outsider, only this time because of her burgeoning lesbian sexuality. In the 1980s, Gay Pride was in its infancy as a mainstream movement, and the ill-defined menace of AIDS was mistakenly believed to be a gay disease. In a heady mix of desire and disquiet, Nina again struggles to understand her circumstances and her place within them. Frequenting the notorious Kat nightclub, Nina takes her first tentative steps on a voyage of adulthood self-discovery.

Slipping seamlessly between her childhood and teen personas, the first-person narrative highlights the emotions and turmoil of the narrator's disconnect and her relationship with her mother. This, along with the portrayal of the gay scene in 1980s Paris and the smoldering emergence of an confident and independent Algeria, the prose transports the reader to a bygone period with veracity.

Author Nina Bouraoui has penned a beautifully written novel which I assume is autobiographical. Stunning for its honesty and incite, it is an intriguing and delightful read.

An enjoyable 5 stars out of 5.

In the first chapter of her auto-fictional novel All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui (translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) writes: “I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for; I trace the thread of my past back as far as it will take me, making my way through the mysteries that haunt me, hoping to unravel them.”

This is just what the book sets out to do, exploring the narrator’s adult sense of identity–lesbian, writer, French, Algerian–through her past. Born to a French mother and an Algerian father, Bouraoui lived in Algiers until the age of fourteen, when her family relocated to France. Through this fictionalised narrative, Bouraoui ‘unravels’ her personal history, from a sun-baked childhood idyll in an Algeria threatened by the looming civil war of the 90s, to her search for connection as an 18-year-old in the lesbian nightlife of Paris, to her mother’s own life and experiences of sexual assault.

The story is told through beautiful vignette-like chapters that flicker between time periods and locations, mixing past and present, Paris and Algiers. It’s an experimental form that risks becoming frustrating, but I found the short chapters page-turningly compelling. The lack of fixed time and location represents Bouraoui’s own feelings of belonging between places: “I can’t choose one country, one nationality, over the other, I’d feel I was betraying either my mother or my father.”

In the Algerian chapters, headed as ‘Remembering’, Bouraoui writes vividly of desert holidays with her mother and sister alongside the horror of political unrest and violence. Roadblocks, harassment, and murders intertwine with family anecdotes and capers with her childhood best friend Ali.

As an 18-year-old in Paris, Bouraoui begins frequenting a women-only nightclub, looking for love but too terrified to act upon her desires. In this intimately anonymous setting, she feels part of the gay community (“I like these two words, they don’t so much belong to me as own me”) but experiences disconnection from her new lesbian social circle (“The women I spend time with are my rivals, women I go out with, not my friends”). Away from the club scene, she also begins to write. These chapters–headed ‘Becoming’–are reminiscent of the Parisian chapters of The Well of Loneliness as well as the works of Qiu Miaojin in their haunting sense of alienation.

The final narrative strand offers an account of Bouraoui’s mother’s youth in a war-torn France and the barriers surrounding her cross-cultural marriage. These ‘Knowing’ chapters mix family oral history with omniscience – how much would the narrator have been told and how much has been imagined?

All Men Want to Know is an evocative, heartfelt novel that explores psychological questions of self, belonging and knowing. While it covers distressing topics, it’s ultimately a beautiful and hopeful account of coming of age while straddling opposing identities.

I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley.

I thought Nina’s writing style was rich, beautifully written, descriptive and fascinating. I enjoyed the book and getting an insight into her LGBT journey, her childhood, and what it was like growing up in a dual heritage household in both Algeria and France, as well as the challenges she faced in life - family, relationships, cultural, and sense of self and identity.

I was nervous about reading this book- I kept hearing about it but last time I read a French translated novel (Lullaby) I didn’t get the hype. Maybe it’s the perfect way this is non-linear or the subject matter that I particularly identify with, but I love this. I devoured it. The voice is perfect and it’s unlike anything I’ve read before. I’d perhaps like to re-read and savour it after I’ve educated myself on the real-life events of time/place and would maybe then give a 5 star review. Excellent literary fiction.

A lyrical and arresting novel about a young woman navigating her strained relationship with her mother and the women she is falling in love with. All of it infused with the national tensions between Algiers and France, this mixed heritage and the warring conflict that ensues imbue the novel with both the grand and the intimate concerns.

All Men Want to Know is a beautifully written novel that deals with the protagonist’s duality, how her heart is torn between Algeria and France, the two parts of herself that cannot seem to coincide, but that she has to try and fit together. It is an extremely vivid and lyrical novel, as the reader feels Nina’s inability to accept her sexuality as a result of the cultural medium in which she was brought up into, and later accepting herself, aided by the community she finds in Paris.

The thing is, there's a huge trend for autofiction which explores identities: sexual and ethnic, and this one doesn't have anything new to say. The narrator is the child of a French-Algerian marriage, and the latter culture forces her to hate and hide her queerness, while the former allows her to explore it. There are the obligatory episodes of violence against women, of the crises of colonialism, and the whole thing is articulated in what I think of as 'creative writing class' prose: dreamy and lyrical, fragmented and lacking incisiveness. The structure makes the contents feel shallow, lacking vividness and engagement - the voice is monotone and never changes pace. Sorry, I feel I've read too many other books set in the same ideological and literary space, and this one doesn't distinguish itself in either voice or emotion.

"I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for; I trace the thread of my past back as far as it will take me, making my way through the mysteries that haunt me, hoping to unravel them."
Personal reflections on cultural, sexual, collective identity in a novel that reads like prose-poetry; Bouraoui's writing style and format feels both unique and close to home which makes for a literary fiction piece of work that swings from intimate to universal.

This is a deeply moving work of “auto-fiction” told through the life experiences of its author, Nina Bouraoui. It combines the authors real life experiences growing up, but is a work of literary fiction in style and scope. Nina has lived a torn life, and one situated between two continents; Africa and Europe. She spent most of her childhood in Algeria where her Father was from before her Mother chose to move to Paris, because of the outbreak of Civil War. This toing and froing between two cultures, means that Nina struggles to come to terms with her identity, “France is an outfit I wear: Algeria is my skin, exposed to the sun and storms.”

The entire novel is told through vivid, first person narration. This may put some readers off, as there’s no typical story structure. However, I loved the sense of depth this created. The prose often reads as part poetry, part inner monologue of Nina’s thoughts, feelings and memories. I found it a harrowing read, as Nina never shies away from the honesty of her experience and the pain she has endured. In this day and age, we are so used to seeing peoples’ ‘real life’ experience through a filtered lens which often bears no reality, however, this novel strips it back to the bare bones. Thus, making it a moving depiction of the difficulties of coming of age, accepting oneself and learning how to live. It is a powerful portrayal of inner tournaments and the pain people go through during the process of accepting themselves.

Despite the novel lacking a traditional structure - it is divided loosely into four sections of memory which are used to account for the different periods in Nina’s life. These are: knowing, remembering, becoming and being. Each comment on her life at its different stages - from living in Algeria and witnessing its turbulence as a country, to beginning her new, independent life in Paris at the age of eighteen and toying with her sexuality. Due to this dual upbringing across continents - Nina grapples with her sexuality - she has been attracted to women for most of her life, however, accepting this has been her biggest struggle, “I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for…”

Homosexuality is still illegal in Algeria today, which relates to the difficulties of not just Nina’s own acceptance of herself, but the society in which she grew up. In Paris, she feels freer to explore this, due to living in a more accepting, Western culture. She acknowledges this cultural and personal struggle vividly, “I’m a victim of my own homophobia” in which the reader is a witness, as Nina documents her first difficult experiences with love and the initial anxieties these bring.

Knowing, draws on Nina’s past experience in Algeria, as she accounts traumatic experiences of witnessing her Mother being sexually assaulted, and depicts the variable climate of Algeria which was going through civil unrest. I couldn’t help but feel this exposure must have impacted Nina’s conception of herself, which then impacted her attitudes towards her sexuality and ability to form relationships with women. She had to get over her own boundaries before those imposed on her from others.

Remembering, documents visions of her past which are mainly in Algeria. Despite the country’s beauty she remembers that, “violence is etched into the land, unending violence” and this struggle is symbolic in her own boundaries to self acceptance. Becoming, is the most ‘present’ aspect of this autobiography, as it follows Nina’s life as a young adult, living in Paris. She frequents a local, lesbian nightclub in the hope of finding love with other women. This is the most interesting part of the book, as it shows how her past struggles and different cultural upbringings shape her identity and coming to terms with herself. She goes up and down like a yo-yo between being proud of her sexuality and path in life, to feeling disgusted, “I’m nothing but a faggot” which demonstrates the tumultuous rage often experienced with coming of age sexuality. But, with an added distressing aspect - her home country of Algeria, would imprison her for displaying her love for women.

Being looks back on her life. This element shows herself starting to accept her identity and letting go of the past. She appears to have found happiness and self love, as a relationship with another woman blooms, “I am the same but I’ve changed, I’ve let go, I’m floating free on this waking dream….” The kind of self acceptance Nina finds, was relieving to read, after Nina’s continuous periods of self doubt. Finally, she appears to be content.

A stunning, autobiographical portrayal of the inner, psychological battle. Torn between two cultures and two ways of living, this documents Nina’s transition between hiding from the world and herself, and embracing it. Harrowing and dark at times, but also uplifting and beautiful.

"People's lives appear to me as a unending series of unaswered questions."

The book moves back and forth in time, in place. It's a book about memory, culture, identity. What is it to be a young lesbian in Paris in the 1980s living in the shadow of AIDS? What does it mean to have been raised in Algiers? Was it a choice, or is it exile? What does it mean to be a daughter?

"You can't think too much about things in life, you'll miss your chance if you do, your dreams will never come true."

The book moves back and forth, from country to country, past to present, even line by line, sections divided between 'Becoming' and 'Knowing.' The author is trying to answer the question of where she is from - does her identity come from her sexuality, her nationality, or more specifically, her mother, who looms over the text, as does a particular incident in the past, only half realised and remembered. The author is aware that she writes to piece together a story - her story, the story of her family, the story of first love, and all the painful realisations that go with it.

“Our hearts will always hold on to the memory of our passions lost.”

The book felt like what I imagined a novel was like when I was a teenager. It's almost written in a stream of consciousness. It's a text saturated with the intensity of youth, of making one's mark in the world. It is saturated with nostalgia and melancholy, and as such I can't say I particularly enjoyed it. Utterly subjectively, it is a text perhaps better read in autumn or winter, rather than in the hot sun as I did. It made me grateful to no longer be so young...but I felt myself repeatedly nodding so often at the youthful intensity, and the declarations made with such fervour. I found the final pages particularly moving.

This book left me with impressions more than anything else. Not sure if it's the writing or the translation, but it's disjointed and fragmented; I loved parts of it, and parts of it confused me.

- Nirica from Team Champaca