Authors Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The closest thing anyone wrote to Wind, Sand and Stars, and by a pilot of the same generation flying the same kind of unreliable aircraft over the same kind of emptiness. Both take the cockpit as a place where a person is finally alone with the earth, both write landscape as something with intentions, and both are more interested in what flying reveals than in the flight itself. Markham is the harder of the two: less philosophy, more horses, weather and men she has no patience for. Read her first if the desert chapters were what gripped you.

The other great flying memoir of the same decade, and the one written from the seat behind. Saint-Exupéry and Lindbergh both treat early aviation as a way of seeing the earth whole for the first time, and both write it in short reflective chapters rather than as adventure. She is the quieter writer and the more domestic one, and Gift from the Sea shows what happens when that attention is turned from a coastline to a life. They knew each other: he stayed with the Lindberghs in America during the war years.

The unsentimental version of the same job. Where Saint-Exupéry turns a night flight into a meditation on responsibility, Gann keeps his eyes on the instruments and lets the accumulation of near-misses make the argument for him, and the effect after two hundred pages is remarkably close. Both books are really about the same thing: what it costs to be the person other people are relying on. Read Fate Is the Hunter after Night Flight and the French lyricism suddenly looks like a choice rather than a temperament.

The same conviction that machines are a moral subject. Saint-Exupéry wrote about aircraft as instruments that reveal what a person is made of, and Shute writes about them as things designed by committees under pressure, which is the less romantic and more frightening version of the same idea. Both men flew, both wrote fiction out of technical work, and both are at their best on the discipline of a job done properly. Start with Slide Rule; it is the closest he came to writing Wind, Sand and Stars.

The writer with the most nearly identical CV: French, a flier, a reporter, and a man who kept putting himself where the story was and then wrote it as fiction. Kessel is the tougher and more worldly of the two — his aviators drink and lie and sleep with each other's wives — and he never reaches for the transcendent register that Saint-Exupéry uses freely. If you want the same era and the same milieu with the mysticism removed, this is the one.

The nearest French relative of Le Petit Prince: a very short parable, written by a serious novelist, about one figure quietly doing the right thing in an emptied landscape, which adults hand to each other and read as a moral instruction. Both books get their power from an economy that looks artless and is not. Giono is the more political of the two — his shepherd is repairing a country ruined by war — and he refuses the melancholy that Saint-Exupéry lets in at the end.

The same trick, played in German thirty years later. Ende and Saint-Exupéry both write a story simple enough for a child and aim it squarely at adults who have made themselves too busy to notice their own lives — the businessman counting his stars is exactly a grey man from the Timesavings Bank. If the parts of Le Petit Prince you remember are the grown-ups on their little planets rather than the rose, Momo is the book to read next.

What Le Petit Prince would be if it were kinder and less lonely. Jansson works the same seam — small creatures on small worlds, a plain drawing beside a plain sentence, grief handled so lightly a child can carry it — and she is the better artist of the two by some distance, because her sadness does not ask to be admired. Read The Summer Book if you are an adult who reread Le Petit Prince recently and found it a little pleased with itself.

The most direct descendant on this list, and the clearest test of how much sentiment you can take. Bach does exactly what Saint-Exupéry does — flight as a spiritual discipline, a fable about a creature who sees further than its own kind, a slim book adults give each other — but with the French irony removed and the uplift turned all the way up. If you loved Le Petit Prince without reservation, you will probably love this. If the rose already tested your patience, skip it.

The same war, the same desert, the same broken aeroplane, told by a man who thinks meaning-making is a form of showing off. Dahl and Saint-Exupéry both crashed in the North African desert and both wrote it up, and the two accounts sit at opposite ends of what a writer can do with the material: one reaches for the stars and the fox, the other counts his injuries and moves on to the next squadron. Read them together and decide which one you believe. It is the fastest way to test whether the lyricism is earned.