This is a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. "Other things in the world are white
but for me porcelain comes first". A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside car
ries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire o
f the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white.
Acclaimed
writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in
the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dub
lin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornw
all to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to i
ts creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many
whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a t
housand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times.
