Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Description

A beautiful hardcover edition of one of Nabokov’s greatest masterpieces, the fantastical love story that was the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.

This story of a man’s lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, or Ardor, published just after Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat.

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Contributors: Vladimir Nabokov,Brian Boyd (Introduction by)
Published: 10/14/2025
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
ISBN: 9798217007776
Pages: 551
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 1.26″ H x 8.17″ L x 5.32″ W

About the Author
VLADIMIR NABOKOV was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

About the Introducer: BRIAN BOYD is the University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His biography of Nabokov won awards on four continents; his criticism has been translated into seventeen languages. He has edited Nabokov’s English-language novels, autobiography, butterfly writings, and translations from Russian poetry. He is the author of Nabokov’s Ada The Place of Consciousness.