The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

This was Nabokov's first novel in English, published in 1941, and might be defined as a character (the narrator) in charge of an author, his dead half brother who had been a novelist. Though short, it is intricate and slightly surreal, even deliberately mystifying, the kind of double or multiple identity story whose ancestry probably lies in Kafka and Pirandello. While the book is scarcely a masterpiece, it is witty, characteristically odd, and stylishly cynical, in a way which looks forward to the Absurdist writers of the postwar era.