Author:Mervyn Peake,Maeve Gilmore,Brian Sibley
In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Confronted by elemental and human threats - snowstorms, shipwrecks and attempts on his life - Titus' bravery is tested and he must fight to free himself from the claims of his past.
Peake began this fourth and final volume of the Gormenghast stories but he died having only written a few pages. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the painter and writer Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of The Gormenghast Trilogy will delight in.
Titus Awakes is a treasure salvaged from the ruins
—— New StatesmanPeake does not, as some have said, defy classification; rather, he is beyond classification in any single genre, and therein perhaps lies his genius. In his centenary year it is to be hoped that the latest surge of interest in his enormous range of work will finally help to place him in his rightful position as one of Britain's most brilliant, original and creative figures
—— Times Literary SupplementA century after his birth, the gothic surrealism of Peake's fantasy world still attracts new fans
—— IndependentSuperbly powerful... A rich, evocative book
—— SpectatorLike all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious
—— Terry Eagleton , StandPaul Durcan has a great comic gift
—— Colb Toibin , Sunday IndependentBy universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James
—— Harold BloomHis mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance
—— Independent