Lolita/Vladimir Nabokov/317 pp.

On its surface, Nabokov's Lolita is the story of an older man's attempt to seduce a young girl. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, rents a room from Charlotte Haze so that he can be close to her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (or Lolita). While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte proposes marriage to Humbert, and he accepts in order to continue living in the house with Lolita. When Charlotte discovers that Humbert is infatuated with Lolita, she threatens to expose his secret; as she storms out of the house, she is killed by a passing car. Humbert goes to the camp and picks up Lolita, telling her that her mother is in the hospital and that he is taking her to the hospital. Instead, they go on a long cross-country trip, during which Lolita actually seduces Humbert. During their trip, Humbert uses persuasion, bribes, and threats of reform school to keep Lolita tied to him, and to get her to perform sexual favors. After a year on the road, the two move to a small New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in a private school; while there, she meets another older man, who plots with her to escape from Humbert. However, this new man soon grows tired of Lolita, and kicks her out on the street. When she eventually reconnects with Humbert, she is 17 years old, married, pregnant, and poor. Humbert gives her money in exchange for the name of the man who stole her from him, and then he goes and murders that man. Humbert is soon captured by the police, and the book is written in the form of a sort of confession of the murder and the events that led to it.
While early readers of the novel labeled it as erotica or a romance, Nabokov (and other critics) insist that isn't the case. The majority of the book deals with the narrator's attempts to keep Lolita under his control, and his realization (later on) that he has deprived her of the opportunity to experience a normal childhood. The writer Martin Amis claimed that Lolita was Nabokov's condemnation of how Stalinism destroyed the simplicity of the Russia of Nabokov's childhood.
When Nabokov first tried to get the book published, it was turned down by all the major publishing houses. He finally managed to get it published by a smaller press; it then proceeded to be banned in both Britain and France, before eventually being a bestseller in the U.S. (possibly because of the hype associated with it being banned elsewhere).