The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - by Mervyn Peake (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

Intoxicating, rich, and unique, The Gormenghast Trilogy is a tour de force that ranks as one of the 20th century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. This special illustrated edition is accompanied by over 100 of Peake's dazzling drawings.

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.

"A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination." --The New Yorker

"The true fantasy classic of our time." --Washington Post

"His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." --San Francisco Chronicle

Review Quotes

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