Thoroughly researched autobiographical fiction of Anne Berest’s family - starting from Russia before WWII and moving through to today, where Anne and her mum are looking for answers. They receive a postcard including 4 names with no return address (truly happened) - and this is where the story begins.

The book moved very quickly and jumping timelines, which worked for me. Anne’s mother has decades of notes from her family and they go searching for answers the grandmother never gave (only holocaust survivor).

I grew so close with this family, and someone mentioned to the author that they felt her family was theirs. I very much feel it was difficult to let them go I miss them tremendously. A truly impactful book with elements of thriller, epistolary sections, generational trauma and history repeating itself.

This was one of the best books I’ve read in the past year, if not 5 years!




Truly recommend although trigger warnings for antisemitism, genocide, death, torture (please check further on storygraph).

Thank you for my e-ARC Europa Editions.

This is one of those books that I really wanted to love: from the intriguing portrait on the front cover to the idea of a tragic family history. In lots of ways this is <i>the</i> history of the European twentieth century made up of persecution, racism and anti-Semitism, emigration, politics and murder in the Nazi death camps. What's missing though for me is a sense of the personal, something that makes this family who they were, and not just another group caught up in the maelstrom.

Although this is billed as fiction, it feels like family history/biography. The interjections of the narrator and her mother interrupt the lives and bring us constantly back to the present. Almost all my friends in my generation have a similar history with ancestors uprooted as a result of WW2 and its aftermath but we don't have direct experience ourselves of those events - and I'd say that's what comes over in this book. For all the research done, the people never really came to life for me and the stories from Russia to Latvia to France to Nazi Germany felt horribly similar to those we've already read. Which is important in itself, of course, as the sheer numbers of, in this case, Jews murdered is precisely what makes this such a shared story.

All the same, as a book this just wasn't the emotive and moving story that I'd expected. For someone younger or less well-versed in this history perhaps this will be more illuminating and revelatory.

An outstanding but deeply tragic family memoir in which Anne Berest researches the history of her Jewish family.

In 2003, Anne's mother received a postcard on which just four names were written, nothing else. They are the names of the family of Anne's grandmother: her father, mother, sister and brother. All four were killed in the war.

Who would write such a postcard, 60 years after the facts? The card triggers an interest in Anne to know more about her family. Her mother is a great help, but there are places she doesn't want to go.

It is an absolute pageturner of a book, especially the descriptions the family's Russian origins, how they came to France and the confusing dangers of the looming war.

I can see why it has won so many prizes. It is an important, thoughtful but accessible book that hopefully many young people will read. I do see it as non-fiction though, not something for a literary fiction prize.