The Hare with Amber Eyes

The recap

Edmund de Waal, a potter by trade, inherits a collection of 264 netsuke, the tiny Japanese carvings of wood and ivory, none of them larger than a matchbox. He first encountered them in his great-uncle Iggie's apartment in Tokyo, and when they pass to him he wants to know whose hands have held them and how such small, fragile things have survived. The search becomes a history of the Ephrussi, a fabulously wealthy Jewish banking dynasty centred on Odessa, Vienna and Paris, once peers of the Rothschilds. Following the netsuke from Paris to a grand Viennese palace and on to Tokyo, de Waal traces how taste, money and belonging shape a family, and how the violence of the twentieth century tears through it. He writes with a craftsman's sensitivity to touch and texture, letting a handful of objects carry enormous histories. Part memoir, part art history and part detective story, the book moves at a quiet, meditative pace that makes its losses resonate all the more.