Muriel Barbery

"The phenomenal New York Times bestseller that "explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building" ( Publishers Weekly ). In an elegant hÃt́el particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible--short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she's everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois...

"Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora, young officers in the Spanish regular army, are stationed alone at Castillo when, out of nowhere, a friendly redhead appears to them in the cellar. There is something magnetic and deeply mysterious about this Petrus. Alejandro and Jess͠ are bewitched, and, in the middle of the sixth year of the longest war humankind has ever endured, they abandon their post to follow him across a bridge only he can see. Petrus...

Rose has turned 40, but has barely begun to live. When the Japanese father she never knew dies and she finds herself an orphan, she leaves France for Kyoto to hear the reading of his will. In the days before Haru's last wishes are revealed, his former assistant, Paul, takes Rose on a tour of the temples, gardens and eating places of this unfamiliar city. Initially a reluctant tourist and awkward guest in her late father's home, Rose gradually comes...

"Haru, a successful Japanese art dealer, has an affair in Japan with a French woman who becomes pregnant with his child, but who threatens to take her own life if he ever tries to see her or the child and, as time passes by, wonders if it's too late to change things"--

The timely story of Paloma a young girl bent on ending it all on her upcoming twelfth birthday. Using her father's old camcorder to chronicle the hypocrisy she sees in adults, she begins to learn about life from the grumpy building concierge, Renee Michel. She begins to understand that there are allies to be found beneath the prickliest of exteriors.