Anne Berest’s The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.
Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.
“Full of suspense and emotion, The Postcard is a quest for origins that plunges us into the darkest hours of European history. A deeply moving book.”—Leïla Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny
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Author bio:
Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and has been a long-selling bestseller in France.
Translator bio:
Tina Kover is the translator of over thirty books from French, including Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, Emmelie Prophète’s Blue, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene. Her work has won the Albertine Prize, the French Voices Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the (U.S.) National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize.
Tina leads literary translation workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University. She is also the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features literary translators reading from their own work.
