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Titus Groan

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What to expect

A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and an array of bizarre creatures haunt the world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. Peake has created a world where all is like a dream—lush, fantastical, vivid, and yet symbolic of a dark struggle.

At the center of everything is the seventy-seventh earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom. Inside, all events are predetermined by a complex ritual whose origins are lost in history, and the castle is peopled by dark characters in half-lit corridors. When Titus is crowned, he is called "Child-Inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways…Child-Inheritor of the spring breezes that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing."

Critics Review

“[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”

C. S. Lewis

“Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work…A classic of our age.”

Robertson Davies

“[Simon Vance] is calm and fastidious-voiced in third person narration, giving us time to revel in the book’s surreal description and ghastly ambience…In the book’s dialogue, however, he takes on the Gormenghast menagerie with brio and versatility, giving each character a distinctive, appropriate voice…Overall his narration is a masterly rendition of a lurid and haunting work.” 

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Washington Post 

“A darkly humorous, stunningly complex tale…This true classic is a feast of words unlike anything else in the world of fantasy. Those who explore Gormenghast castle will be richly rewarded.”

Amazon.com, editorial review
Author Mervyn Peake
Narrator Simon Vance
Duration 17 hours and 33 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781483069746
Format Audiobook
Publisher Blackstone Publishing
Genre Classic fiction, Epic fantasy / heroic fantasy, Fantasy
Availability US

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