Ada or Ardor
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
22nd June 2000
6th April 2000
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Classic fiction: general and literary
813.54
Paperback
496
Width 129mm, Height 197mm, Spine 21mm
342g
Nabokov's 'other' great love story, following an extraordinary relationship across decades and continents Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words.
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.