What To Read

Each season, Tertulia selects some of the most exciting forthcoming books of the season for our First Dibs Editors Salon series. This spring we've highlighted the English translation of Gabriële by the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, Claire Berest. We were honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Michael Reynolds, join us for a salon discussion about the book, which was first published in France in 2017. He also shared this personal note as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

“The Berest sisters follow up Anne’s The Postcard with a colorful portrait of their great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. With lyrical prose, the Berests blend historical context with more intimate insights, such as their attempt to understand why the Picabias were cold to their children.” —Publishers Weekly “Gabriele was a powerful woman who has been kept in the shadows of history. It is time to bring her back into the light, [with] this beautiful and radiant book.” —L’Express “Gabriële is at once a beautiful epic, an intimate family saga, and a meticulous investigation… the story of a turbulent time when everything seemed possible.” —Le Parisien

Michael Reynolds is Executive Publisher of Europa Editions.

While accompanying Anne Berest to some of the events on her 2023 US tour for The Postcard, a book that went on to become a national bestseller, one of Europa’s major successes of the last decade, and a novel that was exceptionally well regarded by critics, I noticed something strange. There were of course quite a few French people or French speakers in her audiences, and while they were thrilled by the success of The Postcard and full of compliments for that book, they also never failed to mention how important a book Anne had written with her sister Claire a couple of years earlier had been for them. Gabriële had been life-changing, they said, or variations on that theme. I hadn’t read the book and honestly didn’t know much about it, but my publishers’ ears perked up, and I asked Gabriële’s French publisher to send me a copy toute de suite.

Gabriële is like The Postcard in many ways—it is a propulsive, true novel based on well documented facts and family history that brilliantly balances an intimate narrative with a big, sweeping 20th-century story. However, in important, ways it is a very different book. Gabriële tells an exuberant, daring, freeing story about one of France’s most remarkable women and the people she knew, loved, and collaborated with. It is a celebratory book about love and creativity, a quest for the essential, elusive truth of a complex woman’s life, and a novel with a bold question at its heart: what connection exists between new ways of loving and living and new ways of thinking and creating?

To my mind, Gabriële resembles The Postcard in one other important way—it feels like the right book at the right time. In this current cultural and political climate, which leaves many of us feeling isolated, constrained, and guarded, it is a hospitable, audacious, liberating book about incredibly fearless people and, in particular, one complex and truly singular woman. When I first read it I experienced Gabriële as a welcome and wonderful gift. I hope to be able to pass that gift on to many readers here this spring.