Seventy years after an enigmatic French author and aviator disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, one New Yorker is obsessively determined to keep Antoine de Saint-Exupéry alive.

Cancer, crying and cocktails. Crafting friendships at the bottom of a glass.

When a car bomb obliterates Iraq’s millennium-old literary heart, a bookseller seven thousand miles away resolves that the voices of Al-Mutanabbi Street will not be forgotten.