Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. It is at once a gripping investigation into family trauma, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.

"A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy." — Vogue

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.

Years after the postcard is delivered, the heroine of this novel is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the travails of the twentieth century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

“Stunning.” — Leslie Camhi, New Yorker

“A can’t-miss novel.” — Chicago Review of Books

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Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard (Europa, 2023), was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, and winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in the New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in the New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in the pages of ELLE magazine. Berest lives in Paris. She is the co-author, with her sister Claire Berest, of Gabriële (coming from Europa in 2025), a critically acclaimed, best-selling “true novel” based on the remarkable life of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet. Berest lives in Paris.

Leslie Camhi’s essays and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times, Vogue, Tablet, and many other publications. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale, and her scholarly work includes essays on kleptomania and 19th-century French medical photography. Her first translation from the French, of Violaine Huisman’s The Book of Mother, was a New York Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, among other honors. She wrote about Anne Berest’s The Postcard for the New Yorker magazine.