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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.
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