Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6594 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

Customer Reviews

the few square centimetres inside your head
Reading this book is like being fully immersed in an utterly fantastic world. The way of life is described in microscopic detail until the existance of a world outside gormenghast becomes unreal. When Titus ventures out of the castle, the world (and indeed our world) by comparison is a pale, washed out image of reality. This is a book with which I have become far more emotionally involved than anything I have read before or since. Every reading feels like a homecoming. Peake's imagery is beautifully, indulgently rich, and the prose has been written with constant precision I defy you to find one single line which does not read like poetry.

good book, bad edition
The book itself is excellent, great atmosphere etc. as everyone else has already said...however I give it 4 stars and am writing on here due to the fact that it's absolutely full of printing errors and has a habit of turning phrases like 'a long finger' into 'along finger'.

So if that kind of thing annoys you...just a warning.

Gothic heaven
There is no other book that I can think of that transported me so completely into its world as The Gormenghast Trilogy. Never before have I been so utterly absorbed by a book (and I've read a lot of books). When I finished it and was singing its praises to my friends, a few people said 'What happens in it then?' to which I found myself replying, 'Well, that doesn't really matter'. Because the thing that makes the Gormenghast books enchanting is the detail, the description, the characters. One of the things that I most loved was that initially, none of the characters seemed to have any redeeming features at all, but as the trilogy progressed, they became more and more complex and started to surprise me. Peake's characters are often compared to those of Dickens, but despite the fantastic setting, they will seem more real and vivid to you than anything Dickens ever wrote.

By the way, the accident in the schoolroom in Vol 2 is one of the funniest things I have ever read, although like everything in the Gormenghast trilogy, it's very, very dark. I can't say that Gormenghast was the most cheerful thing I've ever read, but as soon as I'd finished it, I started straight again.