Gabriële

by Anne Berest, Claire Berest, Tina Kover (Translator)

Overview

A May 2025 Indie Next List Great Read

“Like Gabriële herself, this book takes on big ideas about modern art and modern life.”—The New York Times

The story of a passionate love affair that triggered a revolution.

An atmospheric, exuberant novel from the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, Claire Berest, about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity, and three young people who changed the world.

The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Époque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, 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, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde.

As the Belle Epoque gives way to rebellion and revolution, and the world descends into the devastation of World War I, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriële Buffet revolutionize art and open up new ways of seeing and thinking, along the way posing a vital question for their age and ours: what is the connection between new ways loving and new ways of creating?

Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, London, and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële is as audacious, uninhibited, intimate, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabriële Buffet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798889660897
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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.

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. 

Editorial Reviews

Like Gabriële herself, this book takes on big ideas about modern art and modern life—without losing sight of the people caught and crushed in those turning gears.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A loving tribute to an important figure of the avant garde art movement who was nearly forgotten to history.”—TIME Magazine, A Best Book of April 2025

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

“The most engaging part of Gabriële is the Berests’ prose: early on, the authors note that they will be telling the story in the present tense, to capture the feeling and energy of their great-grandmother. The result is a historical novel unlike any other.”—BookPage

“A masterful portrait of a boldly intelligent but also determinedly self-erasing woman. This book is sure to appeal to any reader looking to explore the alternating currents of revolutionary change in the world of art in the early 20th century and how they played out in one woman’s life.”—Historical Novels Review

“The Berest sisters follow up Anne’s The Postcard with a colorful portrait of their great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. With lyrical prose, the Berests blend historical context with more intimate insights, such as their attempt to understand why the Picabias were cold to their children. Readers with an affinity for early 20th-century art will especially enjoy this.”—Publishers Weekly

“Readers interested in WWI-era historical fiction, art history, and genealogy will be most floored by the Berest sisters’ efforts and all they uncovered and will get the impression that very little is invented, with so many known facts to rely on. From a storied yet painful chapter in their ancestral history, they’ve created their own dizzyingly detailed art.”—Booklist

“Gabriele would have been a wonderful person to know. Reading this book is the next best thing. Muse to the makers of the modern art movement, brilliant musician in her own right, epic mother figure to a manic menagerie of creative intellects, Gabriele Buffet was one of a kind. This loving portrait of a wild time in the art world reveals a fascinating family history by two sisters delving deep into their familial past.”—Reading the West

“An atmospheric excavation of an unusual woman and marriage, both intriguing and remote.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Using the same hybrid genre [as The Postcard], and co-written with her sister Claire, Gabriële fictionally reconstructs the life of the girls’ great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, a ‘visionary art theorist’ who, as the wife of Francis Picabia and mistress of Marcel Duchamp, was embedded, literally, in the heart of the European modernist avant-garde.”—The Globe & Mail

“Gabriële is a pleasure to read, the Belle Époque brought back to life in all its splendor.”—The Telegraph

“The Berest sisters’ aim is to rescue their ancestor from the oblivion into which she has fallen and to reveal her as her own woman, not merely one defined by the men who loved her. In doing this they have also summoned up, with exceptional liveliness and intensity, a vanished world of art, love and experiments.”—The Sunday Times

“The drama of Gabriële is less the life-and-death drama that drives The Postcard than the drama of biography, of how an unconventional life unfolds, and the drama of thought, specifically the ideas that change prevailing notions about mimetic art. The Berest sisters excel at offering refreshing interpretations of the artwork they describe.”—Frenchly

“Sensitive, refined, intelligent… An unmitigated success.”—Les Inrockuptibles

“Wonderful! Two sisters, both novelists, have brought Gabriële Buffet back to life, their words intertwining with luminous tenderness in this finely crafted novel.”—L’Obs

“Gabriële is at once a beautiful epic, an intimate family saga, and a meticulous investigation…It tells the story of a turbulent time when everything seemed possible and the story of inherited pain and long-hidden family tragedies.”—Le Parisien (Week-End) 

“Gabriele was a powerful woman who has been kept in the shadows of history. It is time to bring her back into the light, and Anne and Claire Berest have done just that in this beautiful and radiant book.”—L’Express

“Thanks to Anne and Claire Berest’s gracefully crafted novel, Gabriële is finally taking her first steps toward posterity/eternity.”—Le Point 

“A captivating subject such as this, and personalities such as these, demand care, and that this precisely what the authors have shown them through their meticulous research and beautifully crafted novel…Gabriële is also a chronicle of one of the essential moments of what we now call the avant-gardes.”—Le Monde des Livres

From the Publisher

2025-02-01
A remarkable champion of the avant-garde, unremembered by history, is rescued from obscurity by her great-granddaughters, a pair of writing sisters.

Wife of Francis Picabia, mistress of Marcel Duchamp and, later, Igor Stravinsky, close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and many other notables, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia (who died in 1985 at age 104) was an unknown figure to her great-granddaughters, French novelists Anne—bestselling author ofThe Postcard—and Claire. Why was this memorable woman lost to both her family and the world? The Berests set out to explain the mystery in a curious biographical novel which traces some of Gabriële’s story, drawing on archives, interviews, and historical works. A student of music, first in Paris and then Berlin, Gabriële took no interest in men until, in 1908, her brother introduced her to Picabia, already a star of the art world. It’s a meeting of minds, “conjoined intellects,” and Gabriële inspires the artist to discard Impressionism and paint differently, in a style reminiscent of music. They marry and have four children, Picabia remaining “a flamboyant hotshot”: impulsive, promiscuous, socially voracious, nervously unstable. The novel becomes an account of this union, the art movements (Cubism, Dadaism) Picabia and his friends explore, and of a colorful, creative circle. The couple forms a very close friendship with younger artist Duchamp, who falls in love with Gabriële and folds her into his work. Similarly, writer and critic Apollinaire becomes an intimate, as do others, both in Europe and the U.S. The artistic ferment is interrupted by World War I, by which time the marriage is becoming strained. And there are glimpses of the future: Gabriële’s decline, and an explanation of the family mystery. Throughout, the authors emphasize Gabriële’s intellect, but also her preference—unlike her husband’s—for “remain[ing] in shadow.” This flavors the book, too, which extols but doesn’t fully animate her.

An atmospheric excavation of an unusual woman and marriage, both intriguing and remote.

Kirkus Reviews