The Elegance of the Hedgehog

At 7 rue de Grenelle, an elegant Parisian apartment building inhabited by wealthy families, Renée Michel plays the part expected of a concierge: gruff, unremarkable, invisible. In secret, however, she is a passionate autodidact who reads Tolstoy and Husserl, loves Dutch painting and Japanese cinema, and guards her inner life fiercely against a world that assumes a doorkeeper has nothing to offer.

Two floors up lives Paloma Josse, a brilliant, disenchanted twelve-year-old who has concluded that adult life is an absurd fishbowl and quietly resolved to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. When a refined new tenant, the Japanese businessman Kakuro Ozu, arrives in the building, he perceives what everyone else has missed — and slowly draws Renée and Paloma out of their hiding places and toward one another.

Muriel Barbery's L'élégance du hérisson (published in English as The Elegance of the Hedgehog) is a philosophical novel and a publishing phenomenon in France, blending sharp social comedy with meditations on art, beauty, class, and the meaning of a well-lived life. Told in the alternating voices of Renée and Paloma, it is a tender, erudite story about the disguises we wear and the rare moments of grace that pierce them.