The Little Prince : And Letter to a Hostage

Author: de Saint-Exupery, Antoine

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 2 December 2021 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Penguin Clothbound Classics' series.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's timeless tale, reissued in a beautiful clothbound edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.

The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. 'In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey,' the narrator recalls. 'Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.' And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.