The Postcard: A Novel

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest's The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual & artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, & poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust & partly restored through the power of storytelling.

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 & Emma, & their children, Noémie & Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

15 years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it & why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, & 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, & Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust & partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.

“Full of suspense & 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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Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) & 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 & muse. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia.