The English version of “The Little Prince in Old Age” by author and artist Nabil Abu Hamad was released in collaboration with Cygnus Publishing, London. The book includes 77 pages, and features watercolor drawings inspired by the text. The story of the book revolves around “The Little Prince”, the famous novel of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which was released in 1942 when the author was living in his exile in New York, to which he escaped following the German invasion of France.
The Little Prince has been considered one of the best books in the 20th century, it sold 80,000 copies since its release, and was translated into many languages.
“The Little Prince in Old Age” was published in Arabic, in 2021 by the Arab Scientific Publishers, Beirut.
The story starts with a young boy drawing a snake, then, the drawing becomes real, and the snake devours the elephant. So, the boy decides to quit drawing and starts working as a pilot, but his plane crashes in the desert and he finds himself with a little prince. The narrator stayed in the desert for eight days trying to fix his plane, while the little prince tells the story of his life and speaks about his love for a flower that grows on an asteroid.
In the original story of Saint-Exupéry, the Little Prince inexplicably disappears, but in Nabil Abu Hamad’s book, a spaceship led by an astronaut (the protagonist of the new story) collides with a sturdy object after its navigation system jams.
The collision hits a small star that orbits the sun, and after a while, the astronaut meets the Little Prince who became an old man surrounded by the star’s creatures who have different forms and behaviors than human beings.
