Reynal & Hitchcock

Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions over France during the German invasion of 1940. This is his account — lyrical, philosophical, and haunted by the certainty of defeat. The author of The Little Prince at war, seeing the landscape from above as it burns.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a child from a tiny planet. The most-translated French book in history, and the most elegant fable ever written about what matters and what doesn't.

Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more than accountants). Wind, Sand is his masterpiece of memoir and ode to the romance of flying in its earliest days. Saint-Exupéry crashed many times, including in the Sahara (a gripping account), but the book flies highest when he rhapsodizes about the joys of the sky. “The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth,” he wrote, and in this case it has unveiled the true face of the man.