Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, under the pen name Sirin, for an émigré readership scattered across Berlin and Paris that grew smaller with every year. He then rebuilt himself as an English-language novelist in his forties, in a language he called his third, and produced Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire in under a decade. Chess problems, butterfly taxonomy, and elaborate wordplay run through almost everything he wrote, and the deliberate distance between his narrators and the truth is usually the whole point. Below is his complete run of novels, in order.
By Lisanne Swart · 18 books · 1926–1974 · Updated July 2026
Where to start
His most famous and most controversial work
Lolita (1955) — the novel that made him, and the one no summary can prepare you for.
If you want something gentler first
Pnin (1957) — his shortest, kindest novel, and proof he could write tenderness as well as cruelty.
Mary
Written in Russian as Mashen’ka and published under his pen name Sirin, Nabokov’s debut follows Ganin, a Russian émigré in a Berlin boarding house, as he discovers that a neighbour’s visiting wife is the first love he left behind in Russia. It reads as a young writer’s novel, but the themes of memory and exile that would define his career are already fully formed.
King, Queen, Knave
A young provincial clerk named Franz arrives in Berlin to work for his wealthy uncle and begins an affair with his uncle’s wife that curdles into a plot to murder him. Nabokov later called it the coldest of his novels, deliberately built without a single character he wanted the reader to like.
The Luzhin Defense
Also translated as The Defense, this is the story of Luzhin, a brilliant but socially helpless chess grandmaster whose obsession with the game begins to overwrite his ability to live in the actual world. It was adapted into the 2000 film The Luzhin Defence starring John Turturro.
The Eye
A short, playful novella narrated by a man who apparently kills himself in the opening pages, then continues observing Russian émigré Berlin from what may or may not be beyond death. Its real subject is the unreliability of any single account of a life, including the narrator’s own.
Glory
Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no particular distinction, falls in love with a woman who will not marry him and, partly to prove something to himself, undertakes a dangerous and secretive journey back across the Soviet border. It is Nabokov’s most wistful treatment of the émigré condition, without the cruelty that marks much of his other early work.
Laughter in the Dark
Originally published as Camera Obscura, this is the story of Albinus, an aging art critic in Weimar-era Berlin who abandons his family for a manipulative young mistress and her scheming lover, and is destroyed by the affair with almost mechanical inevitability. Nabokov revised his own English translation so thoroughly in 1938 that the two versions are effectively different books.
Despair
Hermann, a chocolate manufacturer, becomes convinced he has found his physical double in a homeless man and murders him in an elaborate plan to fake his own death and collect the insurance, only for the plan to unravel through a detail he never considered: the two men look nothing alike. It is Nabokov’s darkest comic novel, narrated by a murderer who believes himself a literary genius.
Invitation to a Beheading
In an unnamed, dreamlike dictatorship, Cincinnatus C. is imprisoned and sentenced to death for the invented crime of “gnostical turpitude,” essentially the crime of being unlike everyone around him. Nabokov called it his most poetic prose work, and its surreal, collapsing prison-world is often read as an anticipation of Kafka, though Nabokov insisted he had not yet read him when he wrote it.
The Gift
Nabokov’s last and longest Russian novel follows Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an émigré writer in Berlin, as he researches a biography of his own father and separately writes a scathing, satirical study of the nineteenth-century critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Many consider it the finest of the Russian-language novels and the clearest bridge to what he would later do in English.
The Enchanter
A fifty-five-page novella, written in Paris and unpublished in Nabokov’s lifetime, about a man who marries a sick woman purely to gain access to her young daughter. Nabokov called it “the first little throb of Lolita,” and it was translated into English by his son Dmitri and published posthumously in 1986.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Nabokov’s first novel written directly in English follows a man known only as V. as he tries to write a biography of his recently deceased half-brother, a celebrated novelist named Sebastian Knight, and keeps running into other people’s contradictory, self-serving versions of who Sebastian actually was.
Bend Sinister
Adam Krug, the most respected philosopher in an unnamed, newly totalitarian state, tries to stay above politics as the regime of the buffoonish dictator Paduk tightens around him, until the state finds the one lever that can actually force his compliance. It is Nabokov’s most directly political novel, written during and immediately after the Second World War.
LolitaStart here
Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor, narrates his obsession with and abuse of his twelve-year-old stepdaughter Dolores Haze in prose so seductive that generations of readers have argued about how it works on them. First published in Paris in 1955 after being rejected by American publishers, it became Nabokov’s best-known and most commercially successful book, and remains one of the most analysed and most banned novels of the twentieth century.
Pnin
Timofey Pnin, a hapless, endearing Russian émigré professor at an American college, navigates a new language, a new country, and a series of small humiliations with a dignity the people around him rarely notice. It was serialized in The New Yorker before publication and earned Nabokov his first National Book Award nomination.
Pale Fire
The book presents a 999-line poem by the recently murdered American poet John Shade, followed by a foreword, exhaustive footnotes, and a commentary from his neighbour Charles Kinbote, whose increasingly deranged annotations gradually reveal a second, entirely different story hiding underneath the first. It is widely considered one of the most formally inventive novels of the twentieth century.
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Set on Antiterra, an alternate version of Earth, this is the decades-long memoir of Van Veen’s lifelong, incestuous love affair with his sister Ada, told in prose thick with wordplay, invented science, and literary allusion. At over 500 pages it is Nabokov’s longest novel and, for many of his most devoted readers, his most demanding.
Transparent Things
Hugh Person, a quiet American editor, returns to the same Swiss town across several visits over the years, falling in love, marrying, and moving toward tragedy, narrated by an unseen presence that can see through the surface of any object to its history. It is Nabokov’s shortest and most formally strange late novel.
Look at the Harlequins!
Nabokov’s final completed novel is narrated by Vadim Vadimovich N., a Russian-émigré-turned-American novelist whose life and bibliography closely, teasingly mirror Nabokov’s own, right down to a wife named Vera-like figure and a daughter he adores. It functions as a wry, distorted self-portrait from a writer nearing the end of his career.
Frequently asked questions about Vladimir Nabokov’s books
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