Showing results by author "Maeve Gilmore" in All Categories

Mervyn Peake's 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. Parkinson's disease took Peake's 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....

Titus Awakes is the fourth and last novel in the Gormenghast series and was finished by Peake’s widow, Maeve Gilmore. In this last novel, Titus has left the world of Gormenghast behind, but he remains haunted by memories of his former life. Journeying from snow-covered mountains to archipelagos strewn with coral reefs, he awakens his senses but fails to conquer his aching sense of solitude.

Mervyn Peake was a writer, artist, poet and playwright, best known for his gothic masterpiece, the Gormenghast trilogy. This selection of works from Peake’s Progress includes some of his most characteristic and memorable poems and short stories, from memories of the horrors of the concentration camps at Belsen to the fantastic wit of his nonsense poetry. The selection includes 'The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb', 'The Weird Journey', 'Mr Slaughterboard' and 'Danse Macabre'. It is read by Mervyn Peake's sons, Sebastian and Fabian Peake.