The Elegance of a Hedgehog, the second novel by the French writer Muriel Barbery (b. 1969), made her name famous not only in France, but also in many other countries. Muriel is passionately in love with the work of L. N. Tolstoy and the culture of Japan, and she expressed both of these passions in this book. A teenage girl, smart and educated beyond her years, an elderly concierge studying philosophical works and listening to Mozart, a rich Japanese man who settled in in their declining years in a luxurious Parisian apartment... The reader will learn about what connects these people, how their lives change after they accidentally find each other, by opening this beautiful, subtle, fascinating novel.