Glory by Vladimir Nabokov

From the author of Lolita and Ada

Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him.  Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil project”–an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919.  He succeeds–but at a terrible cost.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian while living in Berlin, where he met his wife.