The little prince lived on a very small planet, hardly any bigger than a house. Lonely on his tiny world, one day the prince, catching hold of a migration of wild birds, left on a journey across the stars to learn life’s mysteries of love, loss and beauty in a universe corrupted by grown-up logic. First published in 1943, and since translated into 270 languages and 26 different alphabets, few books have touched the world like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s modern fable The Little Prince.

Already a best-selling French author and pioneering pilot, Saint-Exupéry wrote his most cherished work while in secluded, self-imposed exile in America after escaping the fall of France to the Germans in 1940. Yet, out of his despair, armed with a set of children’s watercolours and a typewriter, he created a story that was both a wide-eyed celebration of childhood adventure and a sombre, existential work of startling depth. An allegory for the French defeat, a meditation on the singularity of love or a personal note from the author on his own flickering innocence and disenchantment with the adult world? The message spoken by The Little Prince will forever remain a mystery. A year after its publication, Saint-Exupéry took off on a mission over the Mediterranean and disappeared, his body never to be found. In Schiff’s poetic words, the author and his prince would forever ’remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky’.