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Hardback
Published: 17th December 1992
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Published: 26th January 2006
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Published: 7th April 2011
Paperback
Published: 25th August 2011
Paperback
Published: 23rd May 2025
Hardback
Published: 7th September 2023
Lolita
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
7th September 2023
7th September 2023
United Kingdom
Hardback
336
Width 136mm, Height 205mm, Spine 29mm
451g
Vladimir Nabakov's shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. 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 Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.
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.