Description
A sleek, stylish novel set in the New York of the 1940s, between the shock of Pearl Harbor and the landing of American troops in Europe--a deft romantic novel about a wartime triangle involving a twenty-two-year-old fashion designer poised to launch her career . . . the French expatriate writer and war pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who's left his Nazi-occupied country and come to Manhattan for a month, only to stay for two years . . . and his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife determined to win back her husband at all costs--and seductions. With Paris under occupation by Hitler's troops, New York's Mayor LaGuardia has vowed to turn his city into the new fashion capital of the world. A handful of American designers are set to become the industry's brightest names, and Mignonne Lachapelle is determined to be among them. Her ambition and ethics are clear, until she falls for the celebrated and tormented adventurer Captain Saint-Exupery. In New York, he writes a new book on the fall of France, Flight to Arras (it became a number-one best seller) and collects (a year late) his 1939 National Book Award for Wind, Sand and Stars (by the time of his arrival in New York, in early 1941, the book had sold 250,000 copies). To distract him from his malaise at being in exile, and at his U.S. publisher's offhand suggestion, he begins work on a new book, an exotic fable . . . Nothing about Mig's tempestuous, romantic relationship with Saint-Ex is straightforward. The greatest complication, though, comes in the form of his deceptively simple manuscript about a petit bonhomme in the Sahara Desert fallen to earth on a journey across the planets . . .
