A May 2025 Indie Next Pick

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.

Anne Berest
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
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. 

• May 26 2025
  

  "An intriguing portrait of a remarkable woman."

  
  — The Sunday Times (UK)
• May 6 2025
  “A masterful portrait of a boldly intelligent but also determinedly self-erasing woman.”
  — Historical Novels Review
• May 4 2025
  

  "Gabriële is a pleasure to read."

  
  — Telegraph (UK)
• Apr 25 2025
  “With a novel, two sisters set out to reclaim their art-world heritage.”
  — The Washington Post
• Apr 22 2025
  “An unconventional life.”
  — Frenchly
• Apr 22 2025
  “This book takes on big ideas about modern art and modern life.”
  — The New York Times Book Review