The Little Prince

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a strange, quiet little book for 10 year olds about a pilot in the desert and a boy who wants a drawing of a sheep.

What happens

The pilot has crashed a thousand miles from anywhere with enough water for about a week. He wakes at sunrise to a small voice saying please, draw me a sheep.

He cannot draw. He tries. The sheep is too sickly, then it is a ram, then it is too old. In the end he sketches a box and says the sheep is inside, and the little boy is delighted, because now he can see it sleeping.

That is the whole book in one scene. Hardly anything happens and it keeps taking your breath away.

The boy comes from a planet the size of a house, with two working volcanoes he cleans out every morning and one rose who coughs whenever she wants something. He left because he did not know how to love her properly, and he says so plainly, which is quite a lot for a children's book to say.

On his way to Earth he stops at other tiny planets. A king who rules everything and is obeyed because he only ever gives orders that can be obeyed. A lamplighter whose planet spins so fast that he lights and puts out his lamp once a minute and never rests.

The narrator is very funny about adults. He says that if you tell a grown-up you have made a new friend they will ask how old he is and how much money his father makes, and never what his voice sounds like or whether he collects butterflies.

Be ready for the sadness. The pilot tells you in the fourth chapter that his friend went away six years ago and that he has suffered too much grief in writing it down. That mood sits over the whole thing. It is not frightening, it is wistful, and some children find that harder than a scary book.

Our edition is the American translation, so a house costs twenty thousand dollars and the plane is an airplane. Nothing a reader will trip over, but it is not a British text.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes the idea of a pilot alone with something impossible on his wing, Roald Dahl's The Gremlins puts a Hurricane pilot nose to nose with a six-inch man in suction boots, holding a drill.