* 'Two fascinating lives for the price of one' Sunday Telegraph *At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage and an answer to a riddle, VERA (MRS VLADIMIR NABOKOV) explores a remarkable literary partnership - that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his volumes to his wife. Open a work of Nabokov's, and there is Vera on the dedication page, front and centre. But search for her elsewhere, and the woman to whom the author of LOLITA was married for fifty-two years, who carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.' Without my wife, Nabokov once remarked, I wouldn't have written a single novel . Schiff's work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement. A superb portrait' Chicago Tribune'Vera has met her match in Stacy Schiff, whose biography is a model of subtle, searching and elegant scholarship' Daily Telegraph'Following Schiff's bold, patient construction of Vera from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction' Spectator