The little prince

Written during World War II, The Little Prince tells of the friendship between the narrator, an aviator stranded in the Sahara desert, and a mysterious boy he encounters there. Ruler of a tiny asteroid of which he is the only inhabitant, the Little Prince chats disarmingly about his curious adventures in space and since arriving on earth; of his distant home; and of his love for a beautiful and capricious rose, to whom he longs to return. A moving and deceptively simple tale, it was described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as a children's story for adults, and it works on several levels as an allegory of his own life and of the human condition. Children love it for its deadpan fantasy, for its sense of baffled amusement at the grown-up world, and for the author's whimsical watercolour illustrations, which are an integral part of the book.