Pale Fire
1962
Novel
A novel in the form of a 999-line poem by the fictional John Shade, followed by an elaborate and increasingly unhinged commentary by his neighbour Charles Kinbote, who insists the poem secretly tells the story of the exiled king of Zembla. A signature Nabokovian game — part literary parody, part puzzle-box — where the truth of the story has to be reconstructed from an unreliable annotator's marginalia.