A New York Times Bestseller
An Economist Book of the Year
Costa Book Award Winner for Biography
Galaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)
Edmund
de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making
beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a
particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a
collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke,
he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection
had managed to survive.
And so begins this extraordinarily
moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of
the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A
nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis
were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the
World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna,
this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their
vast empire.
