Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Paperback

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both -monumental- (The Boston Globe) and -utterly romantic- (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the emigre author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Vera, and third for no one at all.
-Without my wife, - he once noted, -I wouldn't have written a single novel.- Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Vera, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Vera is a triumph of the biographical form.