‘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?

About the Author

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.