Mervyn Peake Libros

I am now many miles further to the North-East and am writing from a cave in a gaunt hillside. When Jackson and I sat down to rest we could see our footprints stretching back to the edge of the world. . . . Lost in the frozen polar wastes, an explorer huddles in his shelter, typing with freezing fingers the journal of his lonely, extraordinary exploits, preparing to send the story to the nephew he has never seen. With his only companion, the tortoise-like mutant Jackson, the Uncle has gone in search of his ambition and his destiny: the awesome and mysterious White Lion. Illustrated on every page with stunning, beautiful, eerie drawings, this edition has been completely re-originated form the original artwork. Reproduced here for the first time in full colour, Letters from a Lost Uncle is the triumphant product of a unique imagination and a distillation of all that is most powerful in the strange genius of Mervyn Peake.

Originally published in 1946, this little treatise on the simple art of pencil drawing is the perfect antidote to the myriad 'how-to' books that fill the bookshelves.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder. Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake’s widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groan —it is an enrichment and deepening of that book. The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

A story of the macabre and the chasms of the imagination. A gormenghast story. Older readers.

Stranger than fiction, larger than life, full of shades and echoes, Titus Groan is not merely one of the most brilliantly sustained flights of the imagination in modern English fiction, it is also a sustained piece of deadly irony. The characters are weird; the setting fantastic; everything about Mervyn Peake's masterpiece seems eccentric but for the stringent sense of reality which always seeps through the farcical, frightening antics in the mad castle of Gormenghast.

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, and his eccentric and wayward subjects, according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

Mr Pye comes to the Island of Sark with a mission... Mr Pye, however, is prone to excess, and excess is very nearly his downfall. For when the struggle between good and evil becomes embarrassingly personalized Mr Pye finds it difficult to maintain the delicate balance. In his fight he finds invaluable help from Miss Dredger, his aggressively robust landlady, Thorpe, the archetypal seaport painter, and Tintagieu, wanton, blackhaired, five foot three inches of sex, but who still retaines the perfect innocence of a child. Mervyn Peake captures the essence of the closeknit community in the same masterly way he created the Gormenghast trilogy, and leads us to an understanding of the paradox of good and evil. Illustrated by the author.

His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front 'Looking Glass kingdom' depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood