Nabokov’s great autobiography, or really his self-made cabinet of recollection.

It covers his childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, exile, butterflies, tutors, lost houses, family rituals, languages, light, texture, and shows vividly how his memory turns life into pattern. Much like his novels it's more like literary architecture, each remembered object polished until it becomes almost hallucinatory.

For readers who love Nabokov’s fiction, this is one of the keys to the whole machine: the obsession with perception, enchantment, exile, aristocratic ruin, language, childhood, and the tiny visual detail that suddenly opens into metaphysics. Beautiful, brilliant, occasionally maddening, and very much Nabokov being Nabokov — memory as a jewelled trap, with butterflies pinned beside vanished rooms.

Penguin paperback, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1969. Good second-hand condition with visible shelfwear, edge rubbing, cover creasing and page toning.