"It could write itself, I think, this kind of story," admits De Waal, celebrated ceramic artist and a descendant of the once "staggeringly rich" Ephrussi banking family. "A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes . . . a bit of wandering around Prague or somewhere equally photogenic." Instead, he decides to explore his family's history through a "huge collection of very small things", 264 netsuke (Japanese carvings), purchased by his great-grandfather's art-historian cousin in 1870s Paris. His concerns about succumbing to lachrymose elegies are misplaced: behind all the beautiful bibelots lies an ugly core of European antisemitism. The chapters detailing his family's last days in Nazi-occupied Vienna are chilling; the revelation of how the netsuke survived is a testament to human decency. De Waal, a potter who is most comfortable with the hard tactile forms of the material world, breaks his measured prose to write with feeling: "Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not?"