A novel that establishes the author's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation.

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 ...

Augie March is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A 'born recruit', he latches on to a wild succession of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as too limiting. He goes on to recruit himself to even more outlandish projects, but always ducks out in time to continue improvising his unconventional career.

Romance follows Ada and Van from their first childhood meeting through eight years of rapture.

The search for the mysterious V ranges from New York to Cairo to Alexandria to Malta. Apart from its strange heroine, the book's characters include sailors, spies, priests, philosophers, bums and bawds.