The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Vladimir Nabokov (Author) Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works – novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews – are published in Penguin Modern Classics.John Lanchester (Afterword by) John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire. John was raised in South-East Asia and now lives in London.