The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

WINNER
-2007 Brive-la-Gaillarde Reader’s Prize
-2007 French Booksellers Association Prize
-2007 Rotary International Prize (France)
-2007 French Librarians’ Prize for Culture

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

Publishers Weekly: "By turns very funny (particularly in Paloma's sections) and heartbreaking . . . [Barbery's] simple plot and sudden denouement add up to a great deal more than the sum of their parts."

L'express (France): "The ultimate celebration of every person’s invisible part (Renée smells of cabbage soup but reads Husserl) constitutes one of the book’s operative factors."

Elle (Italy): "this second novel by Muriel Barbery, thirty-eight-year-old French author and professor of Philosophy, is among the most exhilarating and extraordinary novels in recent years."

Le Monde: "Fifty-five weeks after it release, Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is still on all of the country’s bestseller lists..."

Repubblica (Italy): "The formula that made more than half a million readers in France fall in love with The Elegance of the Hedgehog has, among other ingredients: intelligent humor, fine sentiments, [and] an excellent literary and philosophical backdrop"