The Postcard($11.77Value)

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A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR TIME Magazine ・ NPR ・ Library Journal ・ The Globe and Mail ・ Lilith ・ Forward Magazine ・ Toronto Star ・ The New Yorker “A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy.”— Vogue “Stunning.”—Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker “A can’t-miss novel.”— Chicago Review of Books “Compelling.”— The Washington Examiner 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. 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. FIVE STARRED REVIEWS, AN INSTANT NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER, AND A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE Named a Most Anticipated Book by the Globe and Mail , Toronto Star , Bustle , Book Riot , Vogue , and an ABA Indie Next Pick Finalist for Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist for Fiction and Book Club for the National Jewish Book Award Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, the Prix Renaudot des lycéens, and the ELLE Readers Prize “Powerful, meticulously imagined... The Postcard (translated into a lucid and precise English by Tina Kover) takes its readers on a deep dive into one Jewish family’s history, and, inextricably, into the devastating history of the Holocaust in France... [A] powerful literary work... that contains a single grand-scale act of self-discovery and many moments of historical illumination.”— Julie Orringer , The New York Times Book Review  “ The Postcard  is also a historical detective story about how to uncover those truths—and what remains forever lost in the fragments of documentation that leave a scattered trail.”— Lucas Wittmann,   TIME Magazine “Moving…Ms. Berest has done her research, artfully weaving grim facts and figures into her family history…Let’s hope that a book like this, which encompasses both the monstrosities of the past and the dangers of the present, will guard us from complacency.”— Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal “In what feels like a literary magic trick, Berest transforms her own family’s complex and heartbreaking Holocaust history into a novel that masterfully blends elements of drama, mystery and philosophy. It’s propulsive yet deep—an intimate, exacting contemplation of loss that somehow ends in love.”— Kate Tuttle, People Magazine “Stunning...[ The Postcard ] leaves us wondering whether the opposite of memory is not forgetting, but rather indifference.”— Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker “ The Postcard is...a powerful exploration of family trauma...transmitted in the womb or down the generations; a longing for what we don’t know and can never know of the people whose lives are responsible for our own existence, and an internalization of the very worst that humans can do to one another, visited on one’s own family.”— Lauren Elkin, The Washington Post  “ Reading this novel is intimate...It is as though Berest has taken us by the hand to lead us through the family home and search for the family graves that don’t exist. Who are your invisible ones? she continues to ask through the tour, and we are forced to answer, both on her account and our own.”— Virginia Reeves, New York Journal of Books “ The Postcard recreates in stunning detail the lives of Berest’s lost family members and weaves them into a detective story, loosely centered on the postcard.”— The New York Times “A can’t-miss novel.”— Chicago Review of Books “An “un-put-down-able” book is like a double rainbow — rare and oh so magical. Titles like  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain,  A Gentleman in Moscow  by Amor Towles,  Beautiful Ruins  by Jess Walter,  The Godfather  by Mario Puzo,  The Thorn Birds  by Colleen McCullough,  Strange Fruit  by Lillian Smith, and  The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.... Now comes another un-put-down-able book,  The Postcard , by French writer Anne Berest.”— Kitty Kelley,  Washington Independent Review of Books “Compelling.”— The Washington Examiner “Whenever I put it down, I was pulled back by the sheer strength of Berest’s storytelling. Her ability to conjure real people in surreal circumstances while digging deeply into her own psyche is profound. My understanding of that time and my post-war family’s reaction to it runs deeper as a result.”— Helene Siegel, Jewish Journal “Straddling the boundary between fiction and memoir, this is one of t