‘Without my wife,’ Nabokov once remarked, ‘I wouldn’t have written a single novel.’. both revolutionary and old-fashioned, an intimate biography that leaves both the dignity and the privacy of its subject intact.” - Newsday Schiff’s elegant prose style at once forceful and playfully allusive in the nicest Nabokovian fashion.” - Los Angeles Times “A sharply focused, vividly detailed portrait. Writing in sprightly prose that captures the ‘verbal tennis’ of the couple’s interactions, has given us a vivid and truthful portrait of a proud and gifted woman whose contribution to Vladimir Nabokov’s life and career was immense.” - The Boston Globe “Schiff has performed a monumental task in drawing a nuanced and fairly detailed portrait of the woman behind the mask both husband and wife conspired to create. She fascinates of her own right.” - The New York Times Book Review But the triumph of Véra is not just in providing entrée to her famous husband. This portrait of a fifty-two-year marriage to a woman who was the writer’s prime reader opens up Nabokov’s private life.

“An absorbing story, illumined by Schiff’s flair for the succinct insight. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine-a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokovs’ fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. “Without my wife,” he once noted, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.” Nabokov wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, and third for no one at all. Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time: Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita Pale Fire and Speak, Memory, and his beloved wife, Véra. ONE OF ESQUIRE’S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME From the award–winning author of The Revolutionary and The Witches comes “an elegantly nuanced portrait of wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.”-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

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