As Freeman’s previous books have included The Meaning of Sunglasses: A guide to (almost) all things fashionable...and How To Be Awesome: Modern life for modern ladies...this is quite a change of subject matter. Oddly, for much of the time, Freeman’s style does not change all that much from the one used in her previous publications. More oddly, the effect is not crass but joyous, empowering and revealing, even amid the horrors that she confronts ... Her book does not focus on trauma. Instead, the Holocaust is like the sun that Freeman cannot look at in her grandmother: what we see are the beautiful clothes; the glamorous friends; the family legends of escape and bravery; and the amazing resilience (both personal and financial) in the decades after the war ... There is sadness here and righteous anger, but, crucially, Freeman eschews the air of melancholy and fatalism that is so often a feature of depictions of the Jewish beau monde ... She thus avoids one of the clichés of Jewish family history and, in the process, throws light on the success of the Jewish diaspora, both before and after the Second World War. In the end, House of Glass is still a feature on her grandmother’s wardrobe, and it is none the worse for that.

... [Freeman] is an incisive chronicler and historical sleuth ... An affecting and ambitious writer, as well as an exacting historian, Freeman tackles anti-Semitism, Jewish guilt and success...Without her ancestors’ 'extraordinary force of personality,' their bold actions, even those resulting in lasting grief, we wouldn’t be fortunate enough to have Freeman or this exceptional book.

A biographer’s gift, [Alex] later became an art dealer, befriending Picasso and living in a home full of works by Matisse, Manet and Renoir ... His story glitters, but there are other biographical riches. Henri pioneered microfilm — a spy story itself — and spent the war hiding in Paris with his wife Sonia ... Bearing witness is a powerful motive, but Freeman also frames House of Glass as a warning against a backdrop of rising nationalism and anti-semitism across the world ... 'Haunting' is an insufficient description of House of Glass. It lingers, chilling the room ... Yet it’s not a book of ghosts; these people exist in high definition, Freeman catching their foibles, feuds, physical quirks and flashes of heroism. Researched with diligence and written with love, it triggers the same shock of recognition that comes from colourised film ... House of Glass opens the door on to the past, and its light spills sharply across the present.

...a capacious family story that...brings to vivid life some of the worst, and perhaps also finest, moments of the 20th century ... Freeman is a determined and eloquent detective. She sifts records, has translations of documents done and travels often with her father to the sites of ancestral life. Above all, she is a splendid creator of character. As she roots around in a past that moves from persecution and the extreme poverty of a Jewish family in the southwestern corner of Poland, to interwar immigrant life in the then unglamorous Marais district of Paris, to the turbulence and death of the war years and beyond, the members of her great and grandparental family take on memorable individuality. What is fascinating to note is that it is some of the forebears she likes least who emerge as distinct heroes ... Her book, written in the shadow of Trump and Brexit, as well as an ungovernable alt-right virtual sphere, underlines the repetitive and irrational nature of an antisemitic blight, often cynically spread by exploitative leaders. The tropes of prejudice slide over into the treatment of immigrants, refugees and foreigners. Freeman underlines that we need, once more, urgently to learn the lessons of this tragic history ... That said, it is the particularities of individual trajectories, the way luck and fate deal so singularly with her family, that make Freeman’s story so gripping ... the story Freeman tells is above all a tribute to human bravery and endurance against the odds. Death may be hideously inventive, but so too is the human spirit.

Alex’s life is a remarkable lesson in what egotism, charm and force of will can achieve against the incoming tides of history ... House of Glass is pacily told — in fact, it’s probably the only recent biography I’ve found myself wishing was a bit more self-indulgent. I would have loved a more colourful picture of Jewish bohemian life in Paris, for example. But Freeman provides a moving and frightening picture of the ways ordinary fates are mangled by the machinery of politics, war and hate. It should be read by anybody who believes history is an abstraction.

Readers of her column in the Guardian will already know how much Freeman can read into, or extrapolate from, a garment. They may have wondered how such an astute, witty writer came to choose fashion as her subject matter. Her family history explains it ... Freeman does full justice to the seriousness of the story she has to tell but, yes, fashion keeps coming into it ... Alex the 'bullet' is such a vivid character that he threatens to overbalance Freeman’s narrative, but though he provides the pizzazz in her story, his quieter siblings provide the strong undertow of melancholy that gives this book its poignancy ... She is best when focusing on the particular ... Her family’s stories, though, scintillate in her telling, and her responses to them are subtle, non-judgemental and illuminating ... a nuanced and compelling picture of life in the diaspora.

...beautifully written ... No story about the fate of a Jewish family in Thirties Europe can be read without a sharp sense of peril and the reader’s fears over which of Sala’s siblings will survive the Holocaust is part of what makes House of Glass so breathtakingly compelling ... She is loving but sceptical towards her family, managing to break down the self-mythologising of her great-uncle Alex while also exploring the dangers inherent in the stereotype of Jewish passivity ... heart-breaking ... powerful.

Sala’s story is the soul of the book, the melancholy fable that haunts its quieter moments, but the star of the show is her brother Alex. Larger than life, gregarious, resourceful, passionate, tough, quick to anger, this was a man who worked himself – and his siblings – out of near destitution, ending up as a regular patron of the most elegant nightclubs of Paris, a gifted couturier and an even more gifted hustler ... House of Glass is not always a comfortable read for the modern European. Freeman is measured but blunt in her assessment of how sovereign nations threw their Jewish citizens under the Nazi bus ... In this regard, House of Glass is not just an epic personal odyssey; it’s an indictment of official history and a nuanced investigation into the nature of Jewish identity. As literature, it’s exhaustively researched, with a prose style that weighs in somewhere between professionally scrupulous and unfussily buffed. Sometimes it’s as well to be educated as entertained.

... as a Jewish reviewer, I recognize Freeman’s ability to glide gracefully from one uncle to another, each one bewilderingly changing his name to establish a new homeland ... This version of the saga, and a saga it certainly is, is a distanced chronicle written without the familiar ambivalence between sympathy and disparagement, the absence of barely acknowledged love and admiration. It makes for wider appreciation, but to others, perhaps deliberately, it just isn’t heimish.

Guardian columnist Freeman...returns with a highly personal, thoroughly and lovingly researched tale of her family ... reeman’s technique is chronological, as she follows one sibling and then shifts to another, which allows readers to learn all the stories ... Frightening, inspiring, and cautionary in equal measure.