Age Group: Adults

Description:

In a grand Parisian apartment building on the Rue de Grenelle, two very different lives are quietly burning beneath their unremarkable surfaces. Renée, the building's 54-year-old concierge, carefully maintains every cliché expected of her — gruff, television-obsessed, plain — while secretly nourishing a fierce passion for art, philosophy, literature, and Japanese cinema. On the fifth floor, twelve-year-old Paloma, daughter of a prominent politician, channels her extraordinary intellect into sardonic observations about the privileged world around her, convinced that life holds nothing worth staying for. When a cultured, warm-hearted Japanese gentleman named Ozu moves into the building, both outcasts find, unexpectedly, someone who truly sees them. A dazzling international bestseller, selling over ten million copies worldwide, Muriel Barbery's novel is a witty, moving, and philosophically rich celebration of the hidden depths that convention so routinely overlooks.