In this short but pungent and entirely characteristic novel, Nabokov tells the tragi-comic story of Professor Timofey Pnin - savant, emigre and linguist, happy in scholarship but disappointed in life and in love. With the lightest of touches the author sketches in a whole history from a few inconsequential episodes. A faculty party, a shipboard encounter, a series of rented rooms, give us the ...

A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death.

First published in 1935, this is the story of a distinguished scholar in Germany between the wars. It builds up the elements in the scholar himself, and in his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction. The author won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Takes us into the prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come.

The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine 'Average Man' party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime.