The Hare with Amber Eyes

Netsuke—tiny ivory sculptures, both functional and decorative, which originated in Japan in the 17th century—are the unlikely objects around which British ceramic artist Edmund de Waal has built his masterful memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Starting in Paris in the 1870s where the netsuke were first purchased by his Jewish great-grandfather Charles Ephrussi during a fashionable craze for all things Japanese, de Waal traces the collection of 264 netsuke as they are handed down through generations of his family during some of the most turbulent times of the 20th century. Owing to his relationship to these objects, de Waal has a unique perspective, at once deeply personal yet grandly historical. And his love for these netsuke, along with his beguiling narrative voice, imbues them with the richly felt qualities of living things, making the story of their endangered existence, in many ways, as fraught and moving as the lives of the people who owned them. Mirroring the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, the Ephrussi empire also dissolves and the netsuke are dispersed, with de Waal assiduously tracking the literal footsteps of his relations as they try to evade the burgeoning Nazi party. Terrifying, heartbreaking, and altogether astonishing, The Hare with Amber Eyes is a one-of-a-kind book that's guaranteed to become a classic.