Lolita

He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language. * Anthony Burgess *Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears. * The Guardian *There’s no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. * The Independent *

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even ‘God’s own novelist’ (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.