By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A stranded pilot and a small prince from a tiny planet strike up a friendship in the desert — a quiet, sad, philosophical fable that people give when the moment matters.
A pilot crashes his plane in the middle of the desert, alone, with barely any water. While he's trying to fix the engine, a small boy appears out of nowhere and asks him to draw a sheep. The boy turns out to be a prince from a planet no bigger than a house, where he looks after a single rose he loves and quarrels with. He's been traveling from world to world, meeting one silly grown-up after another. On Earth he meets a fox who asks the prince to tame him, and teaches him the line the book is famous for: that you only see clearly with your heart, and that you're responsible, always, for whatever you've tamed. Then the prince finds a way to get back home, and the pilot has to let him go.
Grown-ups reach for this book when there's something they want to say and can't quite find the words for — a graduation, a goodbye, a birthday that feels like a turning point. Saint-Exupéry painted the watercolors himself, and the small serious prince in his scarf, the rose, the little planets, are as much the book as the words are, which is why it wants to be a real printed copy and not a screen. A child can read it and follow the story just fine, and the same child comes back at twenty and at forty and finds things that weren't there before. Not many books grow with a person like that. Mine sat on a shelf for years before I understood why my mother had given it to me.