Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Oh, how I love this quiet novel! Written in France in 2006 by philosopher Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is itself quite elegant. Initially only 4,000 copies of the novel were published – and only 12 copies were sold the first week it was on the market. But then through an amazing wave of word-of-mouth recommendations, The Elegance of the Hedgehog rocketed to the top of the French bestsellers’ list. Two million copies were sold in France, and another six million were sold throughout the world. It has been a bestseller not only in France but also in Italy, Germany, Spain, South Korea, the United States, and many other countries. (The English translation is by Alison Anderson.) The novel is set in an upper-middle-class apartment building on Paris’s Left Bank: 7 Rue de Grenelle, known as one of the most elegant streets in the famed French city. The apartment building is a world unto itself, not a microcosm of French society