Vogue: "A new book that plumbs the astonishing ways private lives and guarded secrets can come tumbling – for better or worse – into the open."

A new book that plumbs the astonishing ways private lives and guarded secrets can come tumbling – for better or worse – into the open…Muriel Barbery’s European best-seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Europa) follows the concierge of an haute bourgeois Parisian apartment building who hides her penchant for Mahler and Mann behind the more homely sounds of a blaring TV. She forges an unlikely friendship with the daughter of a parliamentarian who, determined to evade a meaningless adulthood, has resolved to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. As the precocious Paloma says, “ I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.”

By Megan Conway