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Titus Groan - Paperback
$17.49
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Titus Groan
$17.49
Returns: if a book arrives damaged or isn't the one you ordered, email us within 7 days of delivery and we'll replace it or refund you, usually with nothing to send back. Refund policy
Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Atmospheric, Funny, Melancholy
- Kind of story
- Gothic, Literary fantasy, Classic fantasy
- About
- Power, Family, Isolation
- Pace
- Slow burn
- How dark
- 2 of 5. A little dark
- Romance
- None to speak of
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A castle so vast nobody has mapped it, a ritual nobody remembers the purpose of, and a kitchen boy who has decided to climb.
Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, is born on the first page and is an infant for the whole book. The novel belongs to everyone around him: Lord Sepulchrave, drowning in ceremony; Fuchsia, his daughter, furious and lonely in the attics; Doctor Prunesquallor and his terrible laugh; Flay and Swelter circling each other toward murder; and Steerpike, who escapes the kitchens and starts working his way upward through flattery, arson, and patience.
Peake was an illustrator, and it shows - every room and face is rendered with grotesque, loving specificity. Gormenghast itself is the real character: a crumbling immensity where the observance of meaningless ritual is the only thing holding anything together.
Not really fantasy in the usual sense. No magic, no quest. It's closer to Dickens rewritten by a gothic painter, and there's nothing else quite like it. First volume of the Gormenghast trilogy.
Details
- Author: Mervyn Peake
- Introduction: Anthony Burgess
- Series: Gormenghast, Book 1
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9781585679072
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