The staggering success of Edmund de Waal, an obscure British potter-turned-writer, is among the strangest literary phenomena in recent memory. His first book, The Hare With Amber Eyes (2011), was an unlikely bestseller if ever there was one. “I don’t really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss,” he notes in its introduction. But this is exactly what the book is. A tale of splendor and sadness, it is a nostalgic reverie of the Éphrussi family, one of the great Jewish banking dynasties of nineteenth-century Europe, Rothschildian in wealth, Proustian in ethos. De Waal belongs to this family through his paternal grandmother, but the book is not quite a memoir. Neither is it a work of scholarship: we may learn the story of the Éphrussis, but nothing new about their world or the Holocaust, which eventually destroyed it. Instead, de Waal’s project is to follow a set of Japanese netsuke figurines across time and space, recreating the family’s life in the physical places they occupied. The Hare With Amber Eyes is ultimately about the relationship of material culture to historical memory.

“I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden thing that I am rolling between my fingers…and where it has been,” de Waal writes of a netsuke. “And I want to know whose hands it has been in and what they felt about it and thought about it. If they thought about it. I dislike anthropomorphizing objects, but I want to know what it has witnessed, whether I can talk of the memory of objects.”

As a writer, the potter is poetic, but sometimes affectedly so: his prose can often seem as precious as his porcelain. Yet among the scores of talented writers who publish on similar themes every season, it is Edmund de Waal who seems to have won our affection. In both Britain and the U.S., everyone who is anyone has professed their love for his work: Julian Barnes, Colm Toibin, Hillary Clinton. Following the success of The Hare With Amber Eyes, he began translating his book’s nostalgia into a series of high-profile public events, exhibiting his ceramics at Waddesdon Manor (the neo-Renaissance Rothschild chateau in Buckinghamshire), Gagosian Gallery in New York, and, this month, at the Royal Academy. Edmund de Waal is a now a concept: in his work, what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called “the social life of things” becomes the “inner life of things,” material reality replaced with emotional subjectivity. He may “dislike anthropomorphizing objects,” but, in the end, that is the essence of his ruminations.

His writing is alluring and transfixing, but for me the more productive question is why. Why do we love Edmund de Waal, when so many other writers explore similar subjects, many of them with less sentimentality? Part of the answer is his readability, but another part lies in what de Waal is nostalgic for: the continental European pre-war that Stefan Zweig called “the world of yesterday,” an allegedly cosmopolitan Xanadu of intellectual ferment and cultural innovation. As Europe today faces a crisis of purpose within and without, a veritable industry mourns the loss of that mythic world and attempts to resuscitate that imagined yesterday. Recent films such as Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold (2015) lament the loss of art and a way of life that valued it above all else. A renewed interest in writers such as Irène Némirovsky, Joseph Roth, and, most of all, Stefan Zweig himself ennobles the figure of the European at the end of Europe. These figures are venerated less for the artistry of their prose than for the artistry of their lives, each a testament to a cosmopolitan humanity. The Éphrussis were nothing if not Europeans at the end of Europe, embodiments of an ideal we seek to revive.

Yet this alone is not the entirety of de Waal’s appeal. After all, there are many other books in this budding genre, but The Hare With Amber Eyes is virtually the only one to have reached such a wide audience. Its allure is to do with the objects it emphasizes, but what that allure is, exactly, is the question.