The Elegance of the Hedgehog Reading Order

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006, English translation 2008) is the French phenomenon that became an international bestseller — two narrators in a Paris apartment building: Renée Michel, the fifty-four-year-old self-educated concierge who hides her intellectual life behind the mask of stupidity the bourgeoisie expect of her, and Paloma Josse, a precocious twelve-year-old from the wealthy fifth floor who plans to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. A philosophical novel about class, aesthetics, and the unexpected bridges between people, it sold over two million copies in France and has been translated into forty languages.