On holiday, a man and his girlfriend pretend she is a hitchhiking stranger – but their game soon makes them strangers to each other.

‘She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents – used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate’ TONI MORRISON

Phædrus – a character familiar to readers of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

One of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a strange, troubling love story told by the one of the most unreliable narrators in literature. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an afterword by Craig Raine.

The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather.