Editions

  • Home
  • The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780141185996

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 182g

  • RRP: £9.99

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Sebastian Knight's life as he understands it. But buried amid the extensive quoting, digressions, seeming explanations and digs, Sebastian's erratic and troubled persona remains as elusive as ever.

Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a nuanced, enigmatic potrayal of the conflict between the real and the unreal, and the futile quest for human truth.

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780141185996

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 182g

  • RRP: £9.99

More in this Series

View all View all
View all View all

About the Author

Vladimir Nabokov

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, 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.

Vladimir Nabokov

Related articles

/content/dam/prh/articles/adults/2018/september/Penguin_UGCReadingList_ArticleCard.png

Recommendations

100 must-read classic books, as chosen by our readers

05 September 2018

We use cookies on this site and by continuing to browse it you agree to us sending you cookies.

For more on our cookies and changing your settings click here.