The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

The history of a family through 264 objects - set against a turbulent century - from an acclaimed writer and potter. 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: Potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined... The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles' passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese objects were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Later, three children - including a young Ignace - would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion.

Winner of the Costa Biography Book Award 2010.

The history of a family through 264 objects - set against a turbulent century - from an acclaimed writer and potter

Winner of Galaxy National Book Awards: National Book Tokens New Writer of the Year 2010 and Costa Biography Award 2010 and Ondaatje Prize 2011.

Enthralling . . . [de Waalâ's] essayistic exploration of his family's past pointedly avoids any sentimentality . . . "The Hare with Amber Eyes "belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokovâ's "Speak, Memory." - Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post Book World At one level [Edmund de Waal] writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussisâ lavish lives and high positions in Paris and Vienna society. And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitlerâ's 1937 Anschluss . . . At a deeper level, though, "Hare" is about something more, just as Marcel Proustâ's masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society.