With him, her dreams learned to fly. But they came too close to the stars.
MADAME EXUPÉRY UND DIE STERNE DES HIMMELS
(Madame Exupéry and the Starry Skies)
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, September 2021
Paris, 1930. When the young artist Consuelo meets Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at a party, it’s love at first sight. The temperamental Salvadorean becomes the muse of the enigmatic pilot, who would much rather be writing and drawing than flying planes.
His deep love for her inspired « The Little Prince »: Consuelo is the beloved rose that the prince protects with a glass globe, and which is always in his thoughts no matter where his travels take him.
The book made Antoine world-famous, but life by his side was not easy. Consuelo had to deal with his unfaithfulness, and fought hard to establish herself as an artist in her own right – until 1944, when Antoine took off on his fateful flight across the Mediterranean …
Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller, and her new book as well is about another inspiring and important female figure: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wife and muse Consuelo, to whom we owe the story of the Little Prince.
Germany, 1947. Nora’s friend invites her to a German-American New Year’s Eve party, where she’s swept off her feet by the handsome US officer William. Nora tries long and hard to hide her passionate affair from her father, but when she becomes pregnant and William is ordered back to the US she has no choice but to confess. Her father is beside himself, but has a solution: a banker friend of his offers to marry Nora and cover the family’s debts. Nora has no intention of agreeing to the plan. She leaves town with her son under cover of night and takes the train to Munich, where she meets a feverish and confused young woman in the street. Nora walks Celia home – to the villa of the wealthy Wagners, who mistake Nora’’s baby for Celia’s son. It’s a fatal misunderstanding, but one that Nora does nothing to dispel…
Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more x-ray picture—one more after thousands—she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her male colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who’d rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens—the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. Photograph 51. But Rosalind never could have predicted how far her colleagues would go to erase her names from the history books. Marie Benedict’s next powerful novel shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions to science were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind.
Lauren Francis-Sharma’s debut novel ‘