Gormenghast

Mervyn Peake is a master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. [The Gormenghast Trilogy] is a very, very great work...a classic of our age

[Peake's  books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare  dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of  the range of possible experience

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China, where his father was a medical missionary. His education began in China and then continued at Eltham College in South East London, followed by the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. Subsequently he became an artist, married the painter Maeve Gilmore in 1937 and had three children. During the Second World War he established a reputation as a gifted book illustrator for Ride a Cock Horse (1940), The Hunting of the Snark (1941), and The Rime of The Ancient Mariner (1943). Titus Groan was published in 1946, followed in 1950 by Gormenghast. Among his other works are Shapes and Sounds (1941), Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Mr Pye (1953). He also wrote a number of plays including The Wit to Woo (1957), which was met by critical failure. Titus Alone was published in 1959. Mervyn Peake died in 1968.

'The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of [this] age' Anthony Burgess 
 
BOOK TWO OF THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY 
 
Enter the world of Gormenghast...the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder. 
 
Gormenghast is more than a sequel to Titus Groan - it is an enrichment and deepening of that book.The fertility of incident, character and rich atmosphere combine in a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Titus Alone

DISCOVER THE THRILLING CONCLUSION TO THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY 
 
'I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast' C S Lewis 
 
Titus Groan, now almost twenty, escapes from Castle Gormenghast, flees its oppressive Ritual, and becomes lost in a sandstorm. 
 
Helped by the owner of a travelling zoo, Muzzlehatch, and his ex-lover Juno, Titus ends up stranded in a big, bustling city. No one there having heard of Gormenghast, the general consensus is that the boy is deranged, and with no papers, he's soon arrested for vagrancy. 
 
But there are a few people who believe in his story, or at least who are intrigued by it, and they try to help him. And now Titus, the deserter, the traitor, longs for his home, and looks for it all the time to prove, if only to himself, that Gormenghast is truly real. 
 
'[The Gormenghast Trilogy] is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984.' Anthony Burgess

[The Gormenghast Trilogy] is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984.

A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

Peake's books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911. He is perhaps most famous for the 'Gormenghast' trilogy which were published between 1946 and 1959 - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. He has also written a book for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, several volumes of poetry and was a gifted book illustrator. He died in 1968.

THE FINAL PART OF THE MIGHTY GORMENGHAST TRILOGY 
 
'I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast' C S Lewis 
 
In this final part of the trilogy, we follow Titus, now almost twenty, as he escapes from the Castle, flees its oppressive Ritual, and becomes lost in a sandstorm. Helped by the owner of a travelling zoo, Muzzlehatch, and his ex-lover Juno, Titus ends up stranded in a big, bustling city. No one there having heard of Gormenghast, the general consensus is that the boy is deranged, and with no papers, he's soon arrested for vagrancy. 
 
But there are a few people who believe in his story, or at least who are intrigued by it, and they try to help him. And now Titus, the deserter, the traitor, longs for his home, and looks for it all the time to prove, if only to himself, that Gormenghast is truly real. 
 
'[The Gormenghast Trilogy] is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and 1984.' Anthony Burgess

Titus Groan

Mr Peake's first novel holds one with its glittering eye - It has a genuine plot in the strictest sense, and it persuades you to read on simply in order to know what will happen - its gallery of characters is wonderful

A gorgeous volcanic eruption... A work of extraordinary imagination

The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of [this] age

[An] extraordinary story bursting with grotesque characters, madness and mayhem. Fantasy writers of today owe his wild imagination a massive debt

'Gormenghast is, to my mind and to my taste, a perfect creation' Neil Gaiman 
 
Welcome to the world of Gormenghast, the classic fantasy series from the imagination of Mervyn Peake 
 
As the first novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born: he stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that stand for Gormenghast Castle. Inside, all events are predetermined by a complex ritual, lost in history, understood only by Sourdust, Lord of the Library. There are tears and strange laughter; fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings; dreams and violence and disenchantment contained within a labyrinth of stone. 
 
'A gorgeous volcanic eruption... A work of extraordinary imagination' New Yorker

Mr Pye

Brimming with good cheer, Mr Pye decides to bring peace and love to Sark's 289 eccentric inhabitants. This is a charming fable about the battle bewteen good and evil.

The novel gives a clear sense of Sark as somewhere both remarkable and beautiful.

I am delighted to meet you,' trills Mr Pye to a fisherman. 'Are you, eh, you fat little porker,' the thug replies. 'B- you.

Peake has been praised, but he has also been mistrusted," observed Anthony Burgess in his introduction to Titus Groan . "His prose works are not easily classifiable: they are unique as, say, the books of Peacock or Lovecraft are unique . . . It is difficult, in postwar English writing, to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions; he is always exact.

The fable is cleverly and gracefully resolved and the final scenes are a joy to read. Peake's illustrations complement the novel very well and these, too, are examples of his charm, of his enormous illustrative range.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911. He is perhaps most famous for the 'Gormenghast' trilogy which were published between 1946 and 1959 - Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. He has also written a book for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and several volumes of poetry. He was also a gifted book illustrator. He died in 1968.

Equipped with love, Mr Harold Pye lands on the island of Sark, his mission to convert the islanders into a crusading force for the undiluted goodness that he feels within. The extraordinary inhabitants of the island range from the formidable Miss George in her purple busby to the wanton, raven-haired Tintagieu, 'five foot three inches of sex'. Mr Pye, however, is prone to excess and in the increasingly personalised struggle between good and evil, excess is very nearly his downfall.

The Lost Book of Gormenghast

Titus Awakes

The recently rediscovered manuscript of the sequel to The Gormenghast Trilogy. Published to tie in with the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth.

Titus Awakes is a treasure salvaged from the ruins

Peake does not, as some have said, defy classification; rather, he is beyond classification in any single genre, and therein perhaps lies his genius. In his centenary year it is to be hoped that the latest surge of interest in his enormous range of work will finally help to place him in his rightful position as one of Britain's most brilliant, original and creative figures

A century after his birth, the gothic surrealism of Peake's fantasy world still attracts new fans

Born in 1918, Maeve Gilmore was a painter, sculptor and writer. She married Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast novels, in 1937 and they had three children. She is the author of A World Away, an account of her life with Peake. Anthony Burgess wrote of that book, 'It is impossible not to be moved by Maeve Gilmore's memoir...The moral of Gilmore's exquisite and poignant book is that life is hell, but we had better be grateful for the conoslations of love and art'. She died in August 2003. 
 
Mervyn Peake was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are Gormenghast, Titus Groan and Titus Alone.

In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Confronted by elemental and human threats - snowstorms, shipwrecks and attempts on his life - Titus' bravery is tested and he must fight to free himself from the claims of his past. 
 
Peake began this fourth and final volume of the Gormenghast stories but he died having only written a few pages. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the painter and writer Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of The Gormenghast Trilogy will delight in.

The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

A tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. 
 
Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls. 
 
'A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination' The Times 
 
'Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word,' Carlos Ruiz-Zafron, author of The Shadow of the Wind

His novels, said Burgess, are 'aggressively three-dimensional... showing the poet as well as the draughtsman.. It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness' there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions. He is always exact.. . [Titus Groan] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.'

Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word. A word of warning, however: this one takes its time. Most readers are used to more watery offerings - this is thick, creamy and extra-rich

I discovered it at 15 and have been rediscovering it ever since. It's a profoundly enchanting world, but there are no elves or spells the magic is purely in the writing

I started reading it and did not stop.The images conjured up the most weird visions. Images that I had not encountered since absorbing my first introduction to the world of William Blake. It is a fantastic, almost surrealistic flow of vision

Not least among Mervyn Peake's virtues was his ability to be serious while involved in grotesque humour, and to be idiosyncratic while being completely professional. And that drawing was the essential of all he did

A wonderful story, a saga of somewhere strange that beats Tolkien into a cocked hat. Superb language and extraordinary imagination

'The Drowning Girl' was inspired by Peake... Fushia was my dream. The idea of the infinite, of the unreal, of the innocence dying

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China, where his father was a medical missionary.His education began in China and then continued at Eltham College in South East London, followed by the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools.Subsequently he became an artist, married the painter Maeve Gilmore in 1937 and had three children.During the Second World War he established a reputation as a gifted book illustrator for Ride a Cock Horse (1940), The Hunting of the Snark (1941), and The Rime of The Ancient Mariner (1943).Other books include Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and Grimm's Household Tales (both 1946) and Treasure Island (1949).Titus Groan was published in 1946, followed in 1950 by Gormenghast.Among his other works are Shapes and Sounds (1941), Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Mr Pye (1953). Titus Alone was published in 1959. Mervyn Peake died in 1968.

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It [The Gormenghast Trilogy] is a very, very great work...a classic of our age

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience

The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works to come out of the age that produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

ENTER THE CRUMBLING WORLD OF GORMENGHAST... 
 
'A modern classic' Anthony Burgess 
 
'A gorgeous volcanic eruption... A work of extraordinary imagination' 
New Yorker 
 
'A perfect creation' Neil Gaiman 
 
Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls. 
 
'Peake's books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before' C. S. Lewis

Mervyn Peake

Praise for The Gormenghast Trilogy

A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It [The Gormenghast Trilogy] is a very, very great work...a classic of o ...

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience

A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It [The Gormenghast Trilogy] is a very, very great work...a classic of o ...

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience

A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It [The Gormenghast Trilogy] is a very, very great work...a classic of o ...

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience

Books by Mervyn Peake

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter