The Original of Laura

Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a 'maddening masterpiece' documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured and disgraced, Wild instead finds pleasure in life by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes. The late Vladimir Nabokov requested that this unfinished work be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, did not oblige. The result is a remarkable, provocative look at Nabokov's creative genius. Nabokov's final novel - for the first time ever in paperback 'Brilliant . . . Nabokov pulls it off with the nonchalance of someone tossing a ball in the air.' Guardian