Three years ago, the sculptor Edmund de Waal scored a surprising literary success with The Hare with Amber Eyes, a family memoir that became a bestseller. In that book, de Waal traced the fortunes of his father's mother's family, the Ephrussis, an extremely wealthy and cultured Jewish dynasty with branches in Odessa, Paris, and Vienna. The Ephrussis were, among other things, great collectors of art; it was an inherited collection of netsuke, small Japanese figurines, that first sparked de Waal's interest in their story. But most of their artworks, along with their fortune, was lost at the time of the Anschluss, when Nazi Germany absorbed Austria in 1938.

Now the success of de Waal's memoir has enabled him to restore another part of the family legacy. The sculptor's grandmother, Elisabeth de Waal, was born Elisabeth Ephrussi in 1899, and she spent the first part of her life in splendor in Vienna. After marrying a Dutch husband, Elisabeth lived abroad, first in Paris, then moving to England to escape the German onslaught during World War II. All this time, her grandson reports, she maintained her interest in literature, writing and translating in several languages, and completing five novels, none of which ever found a publisher during her lifetime.

But thanks to Edmund's support and the curiosity aroused by The Hare with Amber Eyes, one of Elisabeth de Waal's novels has finally appeared, nearly sixty years after it was written. The Exiles Return is, as its title suggests, a story of lives fractured, like Elisabeth's own, by World War II. Set in Vienna in the early 1950s, while the city and the country were still under occupation by the Allied powers, the book draws on its author's own experience of the postwar city. Here, for instance, is how the train ride into Vienna appears to Kuno Adler, a Jewish scientist coming home after fifteen years in America:

Suddenly there was a proliferation of tracks, and the upper stories of town houses lining the street below glided by. Then the Western Station--or what used to be the Western Station. Formerly, there had been a long and high, cavernous, glazed-in hall into which the trains used to glide; it was old-fashioned, dingy, and yet somehow sumptuously dignified like the well-worn attire of a high-born elderly spinster who has clothed herself once and for all in her best and scorned to change her style. But now there was just—nothing: an open space where the bombed wreckage of the old station had been cleared away; stacks of building material, steel girders and concrete mixers for the new modern station under construction.

In this cityscape turned metaphor, the old luxuries and proprieties have been wiped away, but the new order has yet to emerge; what exists is an open space, in which no one is sure how to live. In Carol Reed's classic film The Third Man, which is set in just the same time and place as The Exiles Return, this disorientation is captured in compositions of shadows and strange angles, and in a story of desperation and moral corruption. De Waal's book, by contrast, is formally conservative, and the city's corruption is manifested in subtler ways, as it distorts the manners and values of those who come into contact with it.

Kuno Adler, whose story is one of three that weaves through the book before finally intersecting, is the novel's only Jewish character, and his story is in some ways the closest to de Waal's. It's not clear from the brief biographical introduction, written by Edmund de Waal, whether Elisabeth ever tried to resettle in Vienna herself, or just visited the city; but Adler's struggles represent her imaginings of what such a return would be like. Adler is an émigré who never adapted to life in America—a failure made all the more conspicuous by the great success of his wife, who started a corset business and made a fortune. The contrast shames him, as does his wife's newfound acquisitiveness, and he decides to try to regain what he lost before the war. Encouraged by a new Austrian law promising restitution to émigrés, he believes that he is going to be given the directorship of the research lab where he used to work—the job he would have had if his career had not been interrupted.