Mervyn Peake Book order (chronological)

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.

In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. 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.

This selection of Carroll's works includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, with illustrations by the author. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen and the White Rabbit are all now familiar figures in writing, conversation and idiom. So too, are the delightful verses such as The Walrus and the Carpenter and the inspired jargon of that masterly Wordsworthian parody the Jabberwocky. Also included are some of Carroll's miscellaneous pieces of work, of which the best-known is perhaps the mock-heroic Hunting of the Snark which epitomises the author's enormous gift for nonsense verse. --back cover

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

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.

Brilliant, disturbing, fantastical and addicitive, Mervyn Peake at one time or another during his brief life touched on almost every literary form. For the aficionado and for the first-time reader, this selection of his less well-known works offers a treasure trove. It includes a wealth of short stories, poems, nonsense verse and drawings - all of them adding new perspectives on this prolific and astonishingly original writer.

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.

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.

Titus, almost 20, flees oppressive Castle Rituals. Lost in a sandstorm, helped by Muzzlehatch owner of traveling zoo and his ex-lover Juno, stranded in big city, arrested for vagrancy, he longs for home. Nobody has heard of Gormenghast, few believe. Titus wants to prove it is real.

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.

Starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast. A grand miasma of doom and foreboding weaves over the sterile rituals of the castle. Villainous Steerpike seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.