Editions

Mr Pye

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099283263

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 16mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 181g

  • RRP: £9.99

Mr Pye

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.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099283263

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 16mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 181g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

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

    The Guardian

  • "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."

    Anthony Burgess

  • "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."

    Washington Post

More from this Author

About the Author

Mervyn Peake

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.

Mervyn Peake

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