Mervyn Peake was een Engelse modernistiese schrijver en kunstenaar, vooral bekend om zijn Gormenghast-romans. Deze verhalen volgen de protagonist Titus Groan van wieg tot graf, hoewel ze oorspronkelijk bedoeld waren als onderdeel van een langere cyclus. Peakes surrealistische stijl, beïnvloed door Dickens en Stevenson, wijkt af van traditionele fantasy. Naast romans schreef hij ook poëzie, korte verhalen en toneelstukken, hoewel hij tijdens zijn leven weinig commercieel succes kende.
Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses lead the reader into places where cause is cut free of effect and language takes on a giddy life of its own. This title contains the poems and illustrations previously published in Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972).
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.