Night Flight
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First published in 1931, Night Flight is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s taut, lyrical novel of the pioneering days of commercial aviation, inspired by his own experience flying postal routes across South America. In Buenos Aires, Rivière, the formidable director of an airmail network, insists that his pilots carry the post through the darkness, where storms, mountains and uncertainty turn every journey into a test of nerve. As Fabien flies into a gathering tempest above the Andes, the novel follows both the pilot in peril and the man on the ground who must weigh individual lives against the demands of a larger undertaking.
Written with the precision of a pilot and the sensibility of a poet, Night Flight transforms the machinery of early aviation into a meditation on duty, solitude, courage and sacrifice. Its night skies are at once physical landscapes and spaces of inward reckoning, while Rivière’s stern philosophy leaves an unsettling question at the heart of the story: what price should progress demand of those who serve it? Prefaced by André Gide and awarded the Prix Femina in 1931, the novel helped establish Saint-Exupéry as a distinctive voice in twentieth-century French literature, anticipating the humanist concerns that would later find their most famous expression in The Little Prince.
From the book
“Although human life is priceless, we always act as if there were something that has an even greater price than life … but what is that something?”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
On Night Flight
“Saint-Exupéry’s second novel recreates the spectacle and immense solitude of flying over the Andes, taking the reader to another world.”
— Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian