Editions

Titus Awakes

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099552765

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

Titus Awakes

  • The Lost Book of Gormenghast

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.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099552765

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • Titus Awakes is a treasure salvaged from the ruins

    New Statesman

  • 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

    Times Literary Supplement

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

    Independent

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About the Author

Maeve Gilmore

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 Titus Awakes, the fourth book in the Gormenghast Trilogy, written from her husband's notes for the book. 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.

Maeve Gilmore

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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