Just as the desert is sculpted by the blowing breeze, so are our thoughts and ideas. The ebb and flow of who we are is symbolized in the asteroids the Little Prince skips across. The characters he encounters are pieces to a greater puzzle—the authority figure, the scholar, the capitalist, the narcissist and the worker—they’re all ideas of what it means…

I’m amazed that many of the events in this book slipped so easily from my memory, as this read-through has scored them there indelibly. The forest, the mountains, the lake – it is the first book I have read for some time that captures such a sense of location, as if I’d been walked through the land by a professional cinematographer. That it achieves this using such uncomplicated, plain words is a…