Lolita
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 5th impression
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Some tears along spine now repaired with non-acidic tape.
Few novels in the twentieth century have provoked as much controversy, admiration, and moral debate as Lolita — a work that arrives draped in scandal yet reveals itself to be one of the most technically brilliant achievements in the English language. Narrated by the cultured, manipulative, and deeply unreliable Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual imprisoned for murder, the novel chronicles his obsessive and criminal passion for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — whom he names Lolita — as he pursues her across the motels and highways of mid-century America in a journey as darkly comic as it is devastating. Vladimir Nabokov writes with a jeweller's precision, layering his prose with puns, literary allusions, and a dazzling verbal pyrotechnics that simultaneously seduces and implicates the reader in Humbert's self-serving narrative. Lolita argues, through its very form, that language can be weaponised — that beauty of expression does not confer moral innocence — and it remains a landmark study of self-delusion, the corruption of power, and the erasure of a child's true voice beneath an abuser's eloquence. First published in Paris in 1955 and scandalously banned in several countries before its triumphant English-language release, it stands as an indispensable, if deeply unsettling, cornerstone of world literature. What does it mean to be enchanted by a monster's voice — and can a reader ever truly escape that complicity?
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Format: Hardback
Published: 1961, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Genre: Classic fiction
Edition: 5th impression
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Some tears along spine now repaired with non-acidic tape.
Few novels in the twentieth century have provoked as much controversy, admiration, and moral debate as Lolita — a work that arrives draped in scandal yet reveals itself to be one of the most technically brilliant achievements in the English language. Narrated by the cultured, manipulative, and deeply unreliable Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual imprisoned for murder, the novel chronicles his obsessive and criminal passion for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — whom he names Lolita — as he pursues her across the motels and highways of mid-century America in a journey as darkly comic as it is devastating. Vladimir Nabokov writes with a jeweller's precision, layering his prose with puns, literary allusions, and a dazzling verbal pyrotechnics that simultaneously seduces and implicates the reader in Humbert's self-serving narrative. Lolita argues, through its very form, that language can be weaponised — that beauty of expression does not confer moral innocence — and it remains a landmark study of self-delusion, the corruption of power, and the erasure of a child's true voice beneath an abuser's eloquence. First published in Paris in 1955 and scandalously banned in several countries before its triumphant English-language release, it stands as an indispensable, if deeply unsettling, cornerstone of world literature. What does it mean to be enchanted by a monster's voice — and can a reader ever truly escape that complicity?