Nabokov's comic masterpiece charts the wry, bizarre progress of Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast-beating heart of the USA. A man of complex emotions, Pnin does halting battle with American life and language. But in this moving, amusing story of a seemingly born loser at odds with the New World, there is all the pathos of a generation cruelly and irrevocably severed from its past.

'Pnin is not more human or more important than other people, he is what humanity looks like when it is faltering and foolish, and trying to rescue a few shreds of dignity and privacy' Michael Wood