Vera

Hailed by critics as "monumental" (Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Vera, the story of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory, wrote his books first for himself and secondly for his wife. Set in prewar Europe and postwar America and spanning much of the twentieth century, this telling of the Nabokov's 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.