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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first novel in English, was completed in Paris in 1938, first published by New Directions in 1941, reissued in 1959 to wide critical acclaim and now relaunched again, with an appreciative introduction by Pulitzer-Prize winning... Read Full Overview

Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Sebastian Knight's life as he understands it. But buried amid the extensive... Read Full Overview

"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically."--John Updike

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story--subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax--about the mysterious life of a famous... Read Full Overview