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I have just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal and can't recommend it highly enough. Although it purports to be the history of a collection of small Japanese carvings (netsuke) it is really about the author's exploration of his family's history. And what a history! Fabulously wealthy Russian Jewish bankers in Paris and Vienna in the 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, they were patrons of the likes of Renoir and Degas, and one ancestor served as the 'model' for Proust's Charles Swann. The family's treatment at the hands of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s is very movingly, but unsentimentally, portrayed.
It's not the sort of book I would normally read - I tend to prefer science to the fine arts, modern thrillers to history, and books about mathematics to biographies - but this one had me entranced from start to finish. I urge you to read it. The book won the 2010 Costa biography award.
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