Lolita

Description

Reissue of one of the best-known novels of the 20th century - the controversial story of Humbert Humbert who falls in love with twelve year old Lolita 'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual adrift in America, is a middle-aged college professor. Haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love, he falls outrageously (and illegally) in lust with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Dolores Haze. Obsessed, he'll do anything, will commit any crime, to possess his Lolita. But once Lolita belongs to Humbert, once he has got what he wants, what next? And what of Lolita? How long is she willing to be possessed?

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.

A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age * Independent * There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth the ride * Independent * A great novel . . . It widens our own humanity * Guardian * You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent -- Martin Amis * Observer * Nabokov's command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use of them, makes reading his work such an intense joy * Daily Telegraph * Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes * Time *