The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan/Gormenghast/Titus Alone(1959)

Mervyn Peake

'The Gormenghast Trilogy is 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, The Animal Farm and 1984.' - Anthony Burgess, Spectator

Gormenghast is the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old ritual, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder - a world suggested in a tour de force that ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.