Gabrile

(Hardback)

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Description

An atmospheric, exuberant novel about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity from the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, the acclaimed novelist Claire Berest, based on the life of their great grandmother.

The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Epoque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabrile, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabrile meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabrile are all three involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde. Surrealism, Dada, and Abstraction are among the new artistic practices and new ideas that emerge from this electric love triangle in the following decade, during which the Belle Epoque sours and the world descends into the devastation of World War I. Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriele Buffet-the protagonists of this brilliantly imagined "true novel"-are vividly reimagined by the Berests. Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, and Saint-Tropez, Gabrile is as audacious, uninhibited, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabrile Buffet.

Reviews

"Sensitive, refined, intelligent... An unmitigated success." - Les Inrockuptibles

'"A story crafted with luminous tenderness."' - L'Obs

"A powerful exploration of family trauma." - Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters (on The Postcard)

"A novel of rare grace and importance." - The Guardian (on The Postcard)

Author Bio

Anne Berest's novel The Postcard (Europa, 2023), was a national bestseller in the US, a Library Journal, NPR, Vogue and TIME Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. It was described as "stunning" in The New Yorker, as a "powerful literary work" in The New York Times Book Review,and as "intimate, profound, essential" in ELLE magazine.

Claire Berest is the author of five novels, including Rien n'est noir, winner of the ELLE Readers Grand Prize, and her most recent, Artifice (Hachette, 2024), and two works of nonfiction.

Tina Kover's translations for Europa Editions include Anne Berest's The Postcard andNgar Djavadi'sDisoriental, winner of the Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, and a finalist for both the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the PEN Translation Prize.