The Elegance of the Hedgehog

£12.99

Winner of the Prix du Rotary International 2007, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is Muriel Barbery’s novel about a silently cultured Parisian concierge and the young daughter of one of her bourgeois successful employers. By turn wise, moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became an international publishing sensation in just one year.

Renée is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building on the Left Bank, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable and honest but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society’s expectations of what an ideal concierge should be. But beneath this conventional façade lies the real Renée: passionate about culture and the arts, and in many ways more knowledgeable than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives.

Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renée lives resigned to this lie and this monotony with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous, predictably bourgeois future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will bring dramatic change to number 7, Rue de Grenelle, altering the course of both their lives forever.