Véra : Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

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 V ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the migr author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory --wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, V ra, 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. V ra, 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 V ra is a triumph of the biographical form.