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  • Published: 13 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9780241951644
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.00

Lolita




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

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.

Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

  • Published: 13 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9780241951644
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov

One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) was born in St Petersburg, but left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.

His first novel in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in 1941. His other books include Ada or Ardor (1969), Laughter in the Dark (1933), Pale Fire (1962), the short story collection Details of a Sunset (1976) and Lolita (1955), his best-known novel.

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Praise for Lolita

You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent

Martin Amis, Observer

A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age

Independent

His 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

A great novel ... It widens our own humanity

Guardian

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

Redeeming, spendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative

John Updike

Rapturous ... incendiary

Time Out