New release

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Gabriele

by Anne Berest & Claire Berest

Narrator Barrie Kealoha

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Translator Tina Kover

Length 11 hours 20 minutes

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bookseller recommendation

“Great fictionalization of the turn of the century art scene in France. ”
— Ana • Rozzie Bound Co-op

Bookseller recommendation

“A beautiful book about the talented French musician Gabriële Buffet and her tumultuous relationship with the artist Francis Picabia. A wonderful book for art and history lovers, and anyone who wants a novel about a strong woman.”
— Kelly Evert • Village Books

Bookseller recommendation

“The Postcard's Anne Berest and her sister, Claire Berest, have written a "true novel" about their intelligent, talented, mysterious, complicated great-grandmother they never knew nor did they know existed until well into adulthood. Turns out Great-Grandma Gabriele Buffet-Picabia was a noteworthy intellect and musician who with her husband (great-grandpa), the Spanish painter Francis Picabia, and friend/lover Marcel DuChamp transformed the art world. Great listen for anyone interested in broadening their knowledge of historical women, the arts movements of the 21st century, and World War I Europe. ”
— Julie Buckles • Honest Dog Books

Summary
About the authors
About the translator

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.

Fiction

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.

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.