The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem Pale Fire is put into a book together with a preface a lengthy commentary & notes by Shade's editor Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the ' Great Beaver' Kinbote is haughty inquisitive intolerant but is he also mad bad
- & even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal & the fantastical Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. Nabokov's darkly witty richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit a story of one-upmanship & dubious penmanship & a glorious literary conundrum.