Read Pale Fire

Humbert Humbert's road trip with a 12-year-old and the most beautiful prose about the worst thing.

Chichikov tours provincial Russia buying dead serfs on paper; Gogol's comic epic.

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.

Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.

Bazarov the nihilist visits the country estate of his friend's family; Turgenev's generation gap.

Alexander Portnoy tells his analyst everything; the novel that scandalised 1969.

A professor of Hitler studies, an airborne toxic event and the fear of death; DeLillo's comedy.