The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal – review

The Exiles Return has been published as a beautiful Persephone Book, with smart dove-grey covers and a riotously colourful endpaper. Before this glorious incarnation, it existed for many years as a ‘yellowing typescript with some tippexed corrections’, one of the few things that Elisabeth de Waal held on to during her ‘life in transit between countries’, one of the few things eventually handed down to her grandson, celebrated author and potter Edmund de Waal.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal told the astonishing and very moving story held in his collection of netsuke, which was also passed down through the generations. Now, in getting Persephone Books to publish this ‘yellowing typescript’, he has enabled this precious object to tell its own tale.

As I read The Exiles Return, I found it hard to forget this “thinginess” of the book. This is a little ironic, given that, according to Edmund de Waal, Elisabeth ‘didn’t really have much feel for the world of objects … she would have hated my fetishising of her books’.