Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary novel narrated by a paedophile used the device of an utterly unreliable narrator to create one of literature's most challenging and technically dazzling works. Rejected by four American publishers, published by the Olympia Press in Paris (1955), banned in France, and finally published in America in 1958, where it immediately became a bestseller. Its prose is universally acknowledged as among the finest in English literature of the 20th century.