https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/books-to-transport-you-the-best-travellers-tales-for-troubled-times

From Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s flights over deserts to Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic, Sophy Roberts picks her favourites

In times like these, I’m drawn towards short stories, novellas and pithy memoirs with a powerful sense of far-flung places: enigmatic flights of fancy.

In the 1920s, the pioneering French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry crisscrossed “desert as smooth as marble” to open up new mail routes across the Sahara. His 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, weaves between past and present, the real and imagined, from cities of salt to antediluvian forests. He describes drinking dew to survive a plane crash, and the discovery of a single orange in the wreckage. “I lie on my back and suck the fruit, counting the shooting stars. For a moment, my happiness is infinite.”