Gabriele

A May 2025 Indie Next List Great Read

"Gabriële is a revealing, heartrending biographical novel about a complicated woman whose imprint on art history is undeniable."--Foreword Reviews

What if revolutions in art and society began with a revolution in love?

Written by Anne Berest (The Postcard) and her sister, Claire Berest, Gabriële is a bold, immersive "true novel" about desire, creativity, and the radical reimagining of how to live.

Paris, 1908. At the height of the Belle Époque, Gabriële Buffet--a brilliant young musician fresh out of Europe's most elite conservatory--meets Francis Picabia, a charismatic and explosive Spanish painter. Their intense love affair plunges them into a Paris alive with artistic experimentation and social rebellion. Soon after, Gabriële meets Marcel Duchamp--younger than Picabia and Gabriële, brilliant, and enigmatic--and before long the three have embarked on a passionate and unconventional relationship that will define their personal stories--and in the process reshape modern art.

As Europe moves from exuberance to upheaval, and World War I looms, Gabriële, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp and their milieu challenge every convention: about marriage, sexuality, authorship, and artistic freedom. Moving between Paris, New York, Zurich, Berlin, Barcelona, London, and Saint-Tropez, the novel asks a question that feels urgently contemporary: can new ways of loving and being in the world create new ways of thinking?

At once intimate and sweeping, Gabriële restores a pioneering woman to the center of a story long told through men, inviting readers to reconsider genius, collaboration, and the invisible labor behind cultural revolutions.

Author: Anne Berest,Claire Berest
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 09/22/2026
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9798889661924

About the Author
Berest, Anne: - 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, winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, and runner-up for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace 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. Her new novel,  Gabriële (Europa Editions, 2025) is based on the life of Gabriële Buffet, whose extraordinary impact on 20th century avant-garde art and whose remarkable life have largely been obscured. Berest lives in Paris.Berest, Claire: - Claire Berest is the author of the novels Mikado (2009), The Empty Orchestra,  Bellevue (2016), Rien n'est noir, winner of the ELLE Readers Grand Prize, and two works of nonfiction, Class Struggle: Why I Resigned from National Education, and Lost Children: An Investigation in the Minors Brigade. Her most recent novel is Artifices. Kover, Tina: - Tina Kover's translations for Europa Editions include Anne Berest's The Postcard, Antoine Compagnon's A Summer with Montaigne and Négar Djavadi's Disoriental, 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.