A sensational study of the author's family, one of the richest European Jewish families, on par with the Rothschilds. They hail from Odessa, but reign in the salons of Paris and Vienna - aesthetes, bankers, collectors, taste-makers. One of the authors relatives collected 264 miniature Japanese carved figures, netsuke, which are carefully passed from one generation to the next.

The history of this collection of remarkable miniatures provides a framework for examining the family itself, from their stratospheric social position of palaces and summer villas, to the terror of Vienna's invasion in 1938, and the wholesale destruction of their households. Yet the collection of carved figures survives intact, in a story that is as astonishing as these tiny carved works of art.

The author, descendant from these great houses, traces his family's history with precision and care, but also with a novelist's eye for the social milieu of their various locales - the glittering salons of Paris, the burghers of Vienna, the simpler country pleasures of rural Czechoslovakia. From their magnificent mansions to the humbler post-war settings of Tunbridge Wells and the Tokyo suburbs, the Eprhussi family rise and flourish and fall and begin to rise once again.

The story is utterly personal, and utterly engaging.