PALE FIRE- Penguin Modern Classics

The famous American poet John Shade was murdered in 1959. This book contains his last poem, together with a preface, lengthy notes and an index by his posthumous editor. Yet this all too efficient editors are. Haughty, inquisitive, eccentric, intolerant he certainly is, but is he - can he possibly be - mad, bad, even dangerous? Tall, brown-bearded, the narrator stalks through the book scattering clues with an imperious hand and discreetly skirting references to his more startling vices. A comic figure on a grand scale, he succeeds in telling us more perhaps than even he intended about what he calls 'the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John Shade's life'.