Lolita

It takes concentration. The sentences are full of wordplay, French phrases and literary jokes, and the narrator is always performing. Reading slowly, a chapter at a time, works best.

Lolita is narrated by a man who sexually abuses a twelve-year-old girl. He tells the story to win you over. The book only works if you keep in mind that he is lying to you, and that the girl at the centre of it is a child.

Any complete edition works. The Vintage International paperback is a common English edition. If you want help with the many references, The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel Jr., explains them page by page.

Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American writer. He wrote Lolita in English and later translated it into Russian himself.

Lolita was first published in 1955 by Olympia Press in Paris, after American publishers turned it down. The first American edition followed in 1958, from G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

The narrator is Humbert Humbert, a European literature scholar. He writes his account from captivity, addressing the reader as if he were on trial.

Dolores Haze is twelve years old when Humbert first meets her. “Lolita” is his name for her; she is otherwise called Dolores, Lo or Dolly.

Because its subject is the sexual abuse of a child, told by the abuser in beautiful, persuasive prose. Readers have argued since 1955 about whether the novel exposes that abuse or makes it too seductive. Many now read it as a portrait of how an abuser justifies himself.

Its subject made it hard to publish. France banned it, together with other Olympia Press titles, in late 1956, and several other countries restricted it in the years after. It has also been challenged in schools and libraries.

No, the characters are invented. Journalist Sarah Weinman argues in The Real Lolita (2018) that the 1948 kidnapping of Sally Horner influenced the novel; Humbert himself refers to that case in the book.

Yes, twice: by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, with a screenplay credited to Nabokov, and by Adrian Lyne in 1997.