Stacy Schiff has brought Saint-Exupery wonderfully to life in this definitive biography of the enchanting and complex man. Drawing on dramatic new material, she provides full accounts of his many harrowing plunges to earth, the most serious of which led to the publication of Wind, Sand and Stars, and of his unhappy yet fertile years in New York, where he wrote both Flight to Arras and The Little Prince.

She includes entirely fresh information on his career as an Allied war pilot as well as a heartbreaking portrait of him as a Frenchman without a country - and without any politics - in 1940. Deftly, she explores his tortured relationships with his wife and with other women, drawing on many unpublished letters and on her extensive interviews with his friends and his lovers. And she sets him superbly in the context of an era increasingly at odds with his courtly personality and romantic vision.