Pale Fire

by Nabokov, Vladimir | Fiction & related items
Published 31/08/2000 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of the Penguin Modern Classics series
Paperback | 256 pages
196 x 129 x 16mm | 194g

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.