Lolita

Humbert Humbert, a European academic with a scholar’s vocabulary and a predator’s appetite, narrates his obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze and the cross-country journey that follows. Nabokov’s achievement, and the reason the book still unsettles, is that the prose is genuinely gorgeous while the man producing it is monstrous, so the reader is implicated in admiring him. Banned, prosecuted and misread as erotica on publication, it is in fact a novel about self-justification, and about how completely style can disguise a crime.