Studio Saint-Ex

This sleek, stylishnovel set in 1940s New York, between the shock of Pearl Harbor and the landingof American troops in Europe, is a deft, romantic novel about a wartime love triangleinvolving a twenty-two-year-old fashion designer poised to launch her career;the French expatriate writer and war pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who’sleft his Nazi-occupied country and come to Manhattan for a month, only to stayfor two years; and his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife determined to winback her husband at all costs—and seductions. WithParis under occupation by Hitler’s troops, New York’s Mayor La Guardia has vowedto turn his city into the new fashion capital of the world. A handful ofAmerican designers are set to become the industry’s brightest names, andMignonne Lachapelle is determined to be among them. Her ambition and ethics areclear until she falls for the celebrated and tormented adventurer CaptainSaint-Exupéry. In New York, Saint-Ex writes a new book on the fall of France, Flight to Arras,and collects (a year late) his National Book Award for Wind, Sand, and Stars. But he suffers under exile and, todistract himself from his malaise, begins work on a new book at his US publisher’soffhand suggestion: an exotic fable. Nothing aboutMig’s tempestuous, romantic relationship with Saint-Ex is straightforward, but thegreatest complication will come in the form of his deceptively simplemanuscript about a petit bonhomme in the Sahara Desert fallen to earth on ajourney across the planets.