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The Hare with Amber Eyes Spiral-Bound | 2021-05-04

Edmund de Waal

★★★☆☆+ from 50,001 + ratings

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"To be handed a story as durable and exquisitely crafted as this is a rare pleasure. . . . This book is impossible to put down. You have in your hands a masterpiece." --The Sunday Times (London)

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. And yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke are hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings would be all that remained of their vast empire.

Edmund de Waal's beautifully written journey of discovery is also a secret history of touch is as startlingly original and haunting as the netsuke themselves.





Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 368 pages
ISBN-10: 1250811279
Item Weight: 0.7 lbs
Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
Customer Reviews: 3 out of 5 stars 50,001 + ratings
"Spellbinding . . . profoundly involving . . . a sensitive and astute inquiry into culture and family, inheritance and preservation, and the secret life of objects." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A lovely, gripping book." --The Wall Street Journal
"An extraordinary history . . . a serendipitous find: The Hare with Amber Eyes is a wondrous book, as lustrous and exquisitely crafted as the netsuke at its heart." --Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor


"Part family memoir, part Proutian confession, subtle, spare, and elegant." --Hilary Spurling, The Independent (London)


"A marvelously absorbing synthesis of art history, detective story, and memoir. . . . Remarkable."
--Kirkus Reviews


"[This] book is also a new genre, unnamed and maybe unnameable . . . [a] cabinet of wonders." --The Guardian (London)


"Full of beauty. . . . Buy two copies . . . keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend."
--The Economist


"[A] beguiling reflection on art, family, and several decades of convulsive European history. . . . The ultimate message of this engrossing book is a profound one: that our lives are made and unmade in the company of things." --Telegraph (London)


"Absorbing and thrilling to read." --The Times (London)

Edmund de Waal is one of the world's leading ceramic artists, and his porcelain is held in many major international collections. He is the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, which won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and The White Road: Journey into an Obsession.