For hedgehog lovers, the title of Muriel Barbery’s 2006 global best-seller, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a bit of a tease. The titular hedgehog is allegorical and never appears in the prickly flesh.

Her new novel, “The Life of Elves,” fully delivers on its title. Barbery unleashes a complete magical menagerie, a kaleidoscopic cast that includes not only elves but also unicorns; a giant squirrel; a fantastical, shape-shifting wild boar; and an otter with a human face.

It is a startling shift for Barbery, a French novelist and former philosophy teacher who catapulted to fame with “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” a quirky, philosophical novel about the erudite concierge of a Paris apartment building and the precocious, suicidal 12-year-old girl who lives upstairs. It became an unexpected blockbuster that sold some 7 million copies worldwide — about 1 million of them in North America — a rarity for a sober literary novel in translation.

Now she has surprised readers and critics by delivering an enigmatic and beguiling fairy tale, unicorns and all. The story centers on two 12-year-old girls: Maria, a charmed orphan with supernatural powers who is taken in by villagers in France, and Clara, a clairvoyant piano prodigy in Italy, who begins having visions of Maria and realizes their fates are intertwined. The girls never meet, but they are drawn together in an epic supernatural battle between the world of elves, a land of swirling mists, shape-shifting creatures and celestial music and art, and an evil elf faction seeking the end of humanity.

The dreamy fable, published in France last year, stunned Barbery’s editor and her translator, Alison Anderson, and even came as something of a surprise to the author.

“I had no idea I was writing a fantasy novel, even though it borrows elements from the genre,” Barbery said during an interview in New York at the small office of her publisher, Europa Editions, which released the novel last week in the United States. “I see it as a very classical novel, with some weird animals.”

Barbery, 46, who spoke quietly and cautiously in softly accented English, comes across as guarded and a bit shy. “I don’t like to attract attention as a person,” she said. She still has not fully become accustomed to life as a literary celebrity, shunning television appearances and refusing to read reviews of her books. She spends most of her time at her home in the countryside south of Paris, writing in notebooks in the company of her two moon-gray cats, who doze on her desk, or walking through her orchards of cherry, apricot, chestnut and fig trees, where she spots foxes, deer and rabbits in the mornings.

But she also has an adventurous streak (she spontaneously moved to Amsterdam for three years because she liked the city’s architecture), and a slightly mischievous, irreverent side.

The idea for “The Life of Elves” came to her a few years ago, when she was struggling to describe the unearthly perfection of Japanese gardens to a friend. The best description she could muster was that the gardens she visited looked like they were created by elves. The notion of elves as intermediaries between the natural and human realms seemed like a promising fictional premise.

Inventing a supernatural world felt surprisingly natural, she said. Barbery, the daughter of two schoolteachers (middle and high), had grown up reading Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and science-fiction novels by Orson Scott Card.

“In fiction, everything is possible,” she said, “so why wouldn’t you allow yourself to imagine everything as a writer?”

Still, she fretted that readers and fans, who have relentlessly pressed her for a sequel to “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” might be put off by the story’s wild fantasy elements.

“It’s such a strange book, even for me, that I was worried no one would be moved by it,” she said.

It is unlikely that her new novel will resonate with as large an audience as her breakout hit. But Barbery has overcome long odds before. She wrote her first novel, “Gourmet Rhapsody,” about a dying food critic who longs for an indescribable flavor from his childhood, when she was supposed to be writing her philosophy thesis. Fiction suited her better than philosophy, a field where “you have to enjoy fighting, and you have to enjoy being right,” she said.

She was teaching educational philosophy at an institute for primary-school teachers while writing “The Elegance of the Hedgehog.” The story followed a character from “Gourmet Rhapsody,” a plump, lonely apartment building concierge named Renée, and fleshed out her story. Her publisher had modest expectations for the book, which had pages devoted to German philosophy, and little in the way of plot.

When Europa Editions released an English translation in 2008, the first print run in North America was just 12,000 copies.

“It had a lot of strikes against it,” Reynolds, of Europa, said. “It was a work in translation, it didn’t have a gripping plot by conventional standards, all those things rang its death knell.”

For reasons Barbery and her publisher still can’t explain, the book became an unexpected hit. Barbery stopped teaching and moved to Kyoto, Japan, where she lived for a couple of years, blissfully anonymous and freed from the crush of sudden fame.

The novel not only changed Barbery’s fortune, but it also probably helped drive readers and booksellers toward other works in translation. Foreign publishers and literary agents started sending more submissions to Europa, and bookstores started placing larger orders. The tiny company’s staff in the United States doubled in size — from two people to four.

Barbery, whose book tour spans Europe, North America, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, is grateful for her global audience. But she’s also eager to get back to writing the sequel to “The Life of Elves,” which will bring together her two heroines, Maria and Clara, as a cosmic war breaks out.

“I’m starting to worry,” she said. “I should be at my desk.”