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?

‘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, wrapped around his particular vision of life, is the Nabokivan finishing touch which 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