Changes

|title=The People in the Photo

|sort=People in the Photo , The

|publisher=Gallic Books

|date=February 2014

|summary=Hélène Gestern's debut novel is a success. Breathing life back into the epistolary genre, ''The People in the Photo'' is an elegant investigation into the workings of identity and history.

}}

Hélène Hivert works at the Museum of the History of the Postcard. It is a job she loves, as she finds delving into other people's lives 'most exciting'. Luckily, she is 'regularly sent collections to catalogue', and each time the 'moment of discovery' gives her a thrill. It may be 'addictive', but 'There is something very moving about the thought that just two or three sources can be enough to build a picture of an entire life'. But what happens when the sources are a bit too close to home, when Hélène must play Holmes among the artefacts of her own family's past, pondering 'the silence of surfaces'? Well, the professional detachment goes straight out the window, and what had been a genuine pleasure, tinged by wonder, now becomes an uncomfortable obsession.