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The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

byMervyn Peake, China Mieville (Introducer)

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He is born to rule Gormenghast, but everything in him longs to escape it.

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl, is lord and heir.

A Gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, with its own ceremonies and age-old laws, Gormenghast has stood so long that its ritual seems stronger than life itself. Titus is born into this inheritance: a castle of eccentric subjects, hidden rivalries and rooms thick with memory.

But things are changing. From the kitchens, the clever and ruthless Steerpike begins his climb towards power, while murder, madness and betrayal unsettle the old order. As Titus grows, the role prepared for him becomes harder to bear: to rule Gormenghast is also to be ruled by it.

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is a classic Gothic fantasy about inheritance, ritual, rebellion and the longing for freedom beyond the castle walls. Baroque, macabre and utterly singular, it remains one of literature’s great imagined worlds.

'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.'

Anthony Burgess

About 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.
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Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781409019794
  • Length: 960 pages
  • Price: £7.99

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