PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
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
