"Without my wife," Vladimir Nabokov once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." But who was Véra Slonim? Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the 20th century, Stacy Schiff's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Nabokovs' 52-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Beautiful and extremely intelligent, Véra is its outsized heroine—a woman who loves as deeply and fiercely as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy, and here she steps out of her husband's considerable shadow.