“The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” the second novel by French writer Muriel Barbery (born 1969), brought her fame not only in France, but in many other countries. Muriel is passionately in love with the work of L. N. Tolstoy and with Japanese culture, and she expressed both of these passions in this book. A teenage girl, unusually smart and well-educated; an elderly concierge studying philosophical works and listening to Mozart; a wealthy Japanese man who settles late in life into a luxurious Paris apartment… What connects these people—and how their lives change after they accidentally find each other—readers will learn by opening this beautiful, subtle, and captivating novel.