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.
Announcing Call Me Kimberly, the Estro Junkies... PREQUEL! Co-written with M Zakharuk!
What you can't face can't hurt you.
What awaits after the gauntlet of transition? For Kay, it’s a completed list of achievements. Top surgery, good grades, a GSA presidency, a partner. Now he’s exactly as average as he’s wished. For Tahani, it’s a hot femme’s life: a gallant butch girlfriend, five missed alarms, and poly growing pains. No doctor can keep her from being the lesbian she was meant to be.
Until the university insurance strips Tahani of access to hormones. On her girlfriend’s suggestion, she comes to the GSA’s president for help.
What starts as a quest to right an injustice pulls on a thread of concealed wounds and desires. Why, despite all his successes, does Kay never feel satisfied? Is his relationship truly that loving, or just another item on his list? Is Tahani’s girlfriend really the butch of her dreams? Which parts of herself would Tahani give up to preserve that dream?
And how much of their lives and hearts have Kay and Tahani rewritten to fit what doctors demand of trans people?
A second entry in the Ranked Competitive Breast Growth series and prequel to Estro Junkies, Call Me Kimberly is an unflinching exploration of trans lives, sexuality, and detransition in times of moral panic.
The first preview chapter will be out for Patrons mid-July. Book 2 of the RCBG novels is out November 26th! Pre-order now:
"I know what butch is. Butches are not beginner FTMs, except that sometimes they are, but it's not a continuum except when it is. Butch is not a trans identity unless the butch in question says it is, in which case it is, unless the tranny in question says it isn't, in which case it's not. There is no such thing as butch flight, no matter what the femmes or elders say, unless saying that invalidates the opinions of femmes in a sexist fashion or the opinions of elders in an ageist fashion. Or if they're right. But they are not, because butch and transgender are the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity, unless it is; see above."
-"I KNOW WHAT BUTCH IS", Butch is a Noun, Essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)
This does come with the caveat that I can't quite remember if the characters in How to Find a Princess, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, and Chain-Gang All-Stars identity specifically as lesbians or not, but they are all sapphic. Full titles under the cut!
EDIT: Apparently Alice Walker is a big proponent of a famous antisemitic conspiracy theorist, David Icke, so be aware of that when considering The Color Purple
