Enter the world of Gormenghast: a vast crumbling castle of labyrinthine corridors and dungeons, turrets and dungeons. At the center is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, Lord and heir to all.
Titus is expected to rule this extraordinary kingdom and his eccentric and wayward subjects. But with the arrival of an ambitious kitchen boy, Steerpike, the established order is thrown into disarray. Over the course of these three novels—Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone— Titus must contend with a kingdom about to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation, and murder.Intoxicating, rich, and unique, The Gormenghast Trilogy is a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. This special edition, published for the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth, is accompanied by over one hundred of Peake's dazzling drawings.
“Praise for Mervyn Peake: "Gormenghast is grotesque, gory, ghastly, mystical, lyrical, monstrous, mind-bending, and inarticulably beautiful." -- The Scattering Blog "A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination." -- The New Yorker "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 is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age." --Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy "[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." --C.S. Lewis "The true fantasy classic of our time." -- The Washington Post "Peake's style is marvelous... His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." - - San Francisco Chronicle "Many readers admire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but fans of Mervyn Peake's Titus trilogy maintain that this extravagant epic about a labyrinthine castle populated with conniving Dickensian grotesques is the true fantasy classic of our time." -- The Washington Post Book World "Mr. Peake's first novel hold 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." -- The Nation "A fancy of such freshness, variety and visionary power that in his own modest, special way Mervyn Peake liberates and elevates as well as charms." -- The New York Times "A brilliant work, the product of a unique mind." -- The Chicago Daily News "It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is really no close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant, and we are right to call it a modern classic." --Anthony Burgess”
Praise for Mervyn Peake:
"Gormenghast is grotesque, gory, ghastly, mystical, lyrical, monstrous, mind-bending, and inarticulably beautiful." -- The Scattering Blog
"A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination." --"The New Yorker"
"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 is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age." --Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy
"[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." --C.S. Lewis
"The true fantasy classic of our time." --"The Washington Post"
"Peake's style is marvelous... His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Many readers admire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, buto
"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."
-- C.S. Lewis
"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
"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 contr
Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone).The Overlook Press publishes these alongside the posthumous sequel Titus Awakes and Peake treasuries The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, Peake's Progress, and The Sunday Books.
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