We hope you will join us in March for our next meeting. We are delighted that MSJ's Head of Library and Enrichment, Dr. Rebecca Jones will be our guest host, and we will be discussing our featured book choice, 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog' by Muriel Barbery.

We invite those local to Malvern to join us in person in the Library from 6.30pm for refreshments, while those further afield will be able to join us as an online guest for the book discussion which will take place 7.00-8.30pm using Microsoft Teams.

Our Community Book Club is free to attend and open to everyone, so please do invite a guest if you would like, whether attending in person or online. The more the merrier!  

A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

We look forward to you joining us!