The Hare With Amber Eyes - Editions

'The Hare with Amber Eyes' is now out in paperback.
Published by Vintage Books

I have spent the last few years writing a very personal book. It is the biography of a collection and the biography of my family. It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora and about the survival of objects.

The collection is of 264 Japanese netsuke. It is the common thread for the story of its three Jewish owners and the three rooms in which it was kept over a period of a hundred and forty years.

The first of the three rooms is the study in Paris in the 1870s of the art-critic Charles Ephrussi, the model of Swann in Proust, hung with Impressionist paintings by Renoir and Degas. The second room is the dressing-room of my great-grandmother Emmy von Ephrussi in the vast Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. The third room is that of her son Ignace, my great-uncle Iggie, in Tokyo in the 1970s, an apartment looking out across central Tokyo.

I am the fifth generation of the family to inherit this collection, and it is my story too. I am a maker: I make pots. How things are made, how they are handled and what happens to them has been central to my life for over thirty years. So too has Japan, a place I went to when I was 17 to study pottery. How objects embody memory - or more particularly, whether objects can hold memories - is a real question for me. This book is my journey to the places in which this collection lived. It is my secret history of touch.

 

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'The Hare with Amber Eyes' is the winner of the Ondaatje prize and The Costa Biography Award.
I also received the award for New Writer of the Year at The Galaxy Book Awards.
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Further Editions:
Brazil: Editora Intrinsica, Oct 2011
Croatia: Mozaik Knjiga, TBA
Czech Republic: Euromedia, TBA
Denmark: Forlaget Hr. Ferdinand APS, TBA
Holland: Mistral, 2010
Hungary: Gabo Kiado, Winter 2011
Israel: Yediot Aharonoth Books, Spring 2012
Japan: Hayakawa Shobo Ltd, November 2011
Norway: Forlaget Press, September 2011
Poland: Czarne Wydawnictwo, February 2013
Portugal: Porto Editora, TBA
Russia: Corpus Books, September 2012
Serbia & Montenegro: Evro Giunti, TBA
Spain: Quarderns Crema Acantilado, TBA
Sweden: Albert Bonniers Forlag AB, TBA