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Also by Edmund De Waal:

The Hare With Amber Eyes, August 2011
Paperback

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES
By: Edmund De Waal

A Hidden Inheritance

Picador
August 2011
On Sale: August 2, 2011
368 pages
ISBN: 0312569378
EAN: 9780312569372
Paperback
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Non-Fiction

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.

Media Buzz

Marketplace - PRI - December 16, 2011