Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

This story of a man’s lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingenious appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, published just after Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat.

Nabokov is the most allusive and linguistically playful writer in English since Joyce, and like Pale Fire and Lolita, this novel abounds in delightful minor parodies and pastiches, countless multilingual puns and literary jokes.

Ada is at its core a love story, the stuff that’s sold reams of pop music, and piles of books. Van, fourteen, falls in love with twelve-year-old Ada during a summer holiday. This premise is possibly the only aspect of Ada common to numerous other novels. Van, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, tells the story, while the narrative shuttles seamlessly from a first person to a third person - trust Nabokov the Enchanter to achieve that trick.

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of childish affection and a meditation on the nature of time* Los Angeles Times *
A gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise. * The Guardian *
A great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous…provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. * The New York Times Book Review *

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781841594361
ISBN 10	1841594369
Title	Ada
Author	Vladimir Nabokov
Series	Everymans Library Contemporary Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Everyman
Year published	2025-09-11
Number of pages	536
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.