Highlights
The Elegance of Muriel Barbery
22 May 2009
Please check Muriel Barbery's profile in Publishers Weekly :
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6660127.html

Muriel Barbery is lovely, not unlike the exquisite prose of her runaway hit novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Why a hedgehog? She shakes her head.

“The whole time [the novel] was just called 'Renee' [the name of the narrator, the concierge in a ritzy Parisian apartment building], but we wanted something joyful, mysterious. My husband, Stephane, suggested the title.” (In hindsight, Renee does have hedgehog qualities) Muriel's husband, whom she met when she was 23, has been an enormous influence on her writing. He encouraged her to publish—she credits him with being an excellent first reader; she calls the milieu of the hedgehog “his universe.” And he made her fall in love with Japan, where they now live—in the city of Kyoto, which she says is like “living in a dream.”

Before Hedgehog, published in the U.S. in 2008 [..] -it has 170,000 copies in print in the U.S., where it sits on the New York Times bestseller list- there was Une Gourmandise, Barbery's first novel, published in France in 2000. Europa Editions, which bought Hedgehog before any of the hoopla, is publishing this first novel in September, with the English title Gourmet Rhapsody.
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