The Real Lolita

Sarah Weinman’s captivating, heart-rending The Real Lolita offers both nuanced and compassionate true-crime reportage and revelatory cultural and literary history. It will, quite simply, change the way you think about Lolita and ‘Lolitas’ forever

Compassionate and necessary, Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita is more than a true-crime achievement. It’s a literary rescue mission, bringing to life the tragic real-life case that forms the dark heart of Nabokov’s classic. You’ll never read Lolita the same way again

A riveting blend of true crime, historical investigation, and literary analysis, Sarah Weinman adds another dimension to this already complicated context - Buzzfeed

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre … Weinman is at her absolute best when playing detective and piecing together this tragic tale in all its sordid detail … the book contains twists and near misses and bit-part players, everything you might expect from a true-crime story, startlingly and simply told - Literary Review

Riveting … Scrupulously researched … Nearly 70 years after Sally Horner’s death, Weinman’s dark and compulsively readable book will make readers aware of the absence of a nearly forgotten girl’s voice in discussions of one of the great works of American literature - Los Angeles Times

Superb … By combing through court documents and newspaper accounts and interviewing surviving friends and family members, Weinman has evocatively reconstructed Sally [Horner]’s nightmare, as well as the sexual mores of mid-twentieth-century America - Irish Independent

Superb … [Weinman] has now become something of a literary detective herself, conducting an investigation into the case she says inspired Lolita … Weinman assembles a substantial array of evidence … Weinman has compassionately given Sally Horner pride of place once more in her own life, a life that was first brutally warped by Frank La Salle, and then appropriated by one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century - Washington Post