Search Worlds Without End

The first volume of the GORMENGHAST trilogy of fantasy novels. Titus Groan is born the heir to Gormenghast castle, and finds himself in a world predetermined by complex rituals that have been made obscure by the passage of time. Along the corridors of the castle, the child encounters some of the dark characters who will shape his life.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. 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, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral stairacse to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder.

Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake's widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groan--it is an enrichment and deepening of that book. And back in single volumes for the first time in years, a new generation of fantasy fans will grow to love this tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

As the novel opens, Titus, lord of Castle Gormenghast, has abdicated his throne. Born and brought to the edge of manhood in the huge, rotting castle, Titus rebels against the age-old ritual of which he is both lord and prisoner and rushes headlong into the world. From that moment forward, he is thrust into a stormy land of a dark imagination, where figures and landscapes loom up with force and vividness of a dream--or a nightmare.

This final installment in the Gormenghast trilogy is a fantastic triumph--a conquest awash in imagination, terror, and charm.

Mervyn Peake¹s Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream--lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson¹s disease took Peake¹s life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed.

In January of 2010, Peake¹s granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who has at last finished Peake¹s masterpiece.

It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: "With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him."

Fans of Peake will delight in this new, wonderful novel, published one hundred years after his birth, every bit as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy.