A maker of beautiful pots that become more and more prized as they change hands, master ceramicist Edmund de Waal understands the hidden lives of objects. So when he inherits 264 Japanese netsuke, he can't help wondering who had touched, collected, and kept them, and how the collection had managed to survive even when his wealthy Russian Jewish family was destroyed in World War II. In this extraordinary, genre-defying book—part family memoir, part cultural history, part globetrotting detective story, and the winner of the 2010 Costa Book Award and the Ondaatje Prize—de Waal sets out to discover the stories of these tiny wood and ivory carvings.