Books like Ms. Hempel Chronicles — picked by fans

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

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.

Fifteen years after… show more.

A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all.

'An unflinchingly true and honest depiction of a marriage turning from gold to dust ' - Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace

'A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be.' - Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker… show more.