Mervyn Peake

Six stories written across a range of genres and settings, including a macabre ghost story, and wry character studies drawn from the author's life in London and on the island of Sark in the Channel Islands.

"Titus Groan is seven, 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 stairacse to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder"--P. of cover.

According to "First edition of poems Mervyn Peake wrote when, in his words, he was "commissioned as a war-artist to record my impressions of work in a glass-blowing factory near Birmingham, I found on entering the huge, ruinous, grimy, wharf-walled buildings a world upon its own, a place of roaring fires and monstrous shadows.""

On a fantastic island populated by unusual animals, a pirate captain finds a trustworthy companion in the little "Yellow Creature."

Maeve Gilmore writes "Shapes and Sounds was the first book of poems published by my husband Mervyn Peake. It appeared in 1941 [Chatto & Windus], and when the Village Press expressed the wish to re-publish it, I was immeasurably happy. It is strange to think that when these poems appeared, Titus Groan and Gormenghast were buried in a nebulous future.