Product Description
by Peaky Mervyn (Author)
An heir has been born in Gormenghast... Gormenghast Castle is the home of the ancient dynasty of the Groan counts, a place so huge, big as a city, that none of its inhabitants have walked through all its nooks and crannies. There we meet quirky beings: a brooding nobleman, the seventy-sixth Count Groan, who rules the castle; his wife, shrouded in a cloud of white cats; his daughter, wild and dreamy among old toys, books and scraps of cloth; creepy figures overseeing the kitchens; and youths hatching rebellion. But something unites these characters: their bodies and psyches are a materialization of the castle, just as the castle is a concretion of their being. For them, there is no conceivable life outside those stone corridors, halls, towers and attics. The birth of a male heir, Titus Groan, will, however, bring the threat of change. Mervyn Peake is a capital figure in English literature. His Gormenghast saga, which begins with Titus Groan, is a great feat of fantasy literature, and has a multitude of stalwarts around the world.
Author Biography
Mervyn Peake (1911 - 1968) was a British writer, poet and illustrator. He is best known for the Titus books (also called the Gormenghast trilogy), which comprise Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus alone. The three existing works of this saga are only the beginning of what Peake conceived as a much longer cycle, which would recount the adventures of his protagonist Titus Groan throughout his life, but death surprised the author before he could finish it. The work, unfinished, is often considered, erroneously, as a trilogy. His work is also often compared to that of his contemporary J. R. R. R. Tolkien, although the surrealistic treatment of his stories is more influenced by his early admiration for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson than Tolkien's studies of mythology.
