Search Worlds Without End

Boy in Darkness, the centrepiece of this collection, will be of special interest to fans of the Gormenghast books, as it comprises a chapter in the life of Titus Groan that unfolds beyond the pages of Mervyn Peake's monumental trilogy. It begins on the occasion of Titus's fourteenth birthday. Overwhelmed by the pomp and gruelling ritual of life in Gormenghast, he braves an escape from his hereditary gaol. Beyond the castle walls, Titus wanders into a sinister and soulless land, where he is captured by Goat and Hyena, the grotesque henchmen of an evil master intent on claiming young Titus's soul. A disturbingly atmospheric tale, told with the force and simplicity of allegory, 'Boy in Darkness' distills the strange logic of the Gormenghast trilogy into a story of pith and mystery, which bears comparison with Kafka and Poe.

Written across a range of genres, from a ghost story, to wry character studies drawn from his life in London and on the Isle of Sark, the other stories in the volume reveal surprisingly different facets of Peake's uncanny imagination. Ultimately, the collection coheres through Peake's powers to enchant the mundane and to render the fantastic normal.

Featuring 40 illustrations by the author

With a foreword by the acclaimed author Joanne Harris and an introduction by the author's late widow, Maeve Gilmore

Table of Contents:

• Foreword (2008) - essay by Joanne Harris
• Preface (2008) - essay by Sebastian Peake
• Foreword to Boy in Darkness (2008) - essay by Maeve Gilmore
• Boy in Darkness (1956)
• The Weird Journey (1981)
• I Bought a Palm-Tree (1981)
• The Connoisseurs (1981)
• Danse Macabre (1963)
• Same Time, Same Place (1963)

Lost in the frozen polar wastes, an explorer huddles in his shelter, typing with freezing fingers the journal of his lonely, extraordinary exploits, preparing to send the story to the nephew he has never seen. With his only companion, the tortoise-like mutant Jackson, the Uncle has gone in search of his ambition and destiny: the awesome and mysterious White Lion.

Illustrated on every page with stunning, beautiful, eerie drawings, this edition has been completely re-originated from the original artwork. Reproduced here for the first time in full color, Letters from a Lost Uncle is the triumphant production of a unique imagination and a distillation of all that is most powerful in the strange genius of Mervyn Peake.

Peake's Progress is a selection, compiled by his widow, Maeve Gilmore, from every period of his work as a writer and draughtsman. It contains a remarkable work from childhood. The White Chief of the Umzimbooboo Kaffirs, the early Mr. Slaughterboard, which foreshadows the Titus books, two plays, the Wit to Woo and Noah's Ark, a broadcast version of Mr. Pye, and a generous selection of Peake's short stories, poems and nonsense verses as well as his drawings.

Including a new preface written by Mervyn Peake's son, Sebastian, this edition of Peake's Progress is published to coincide with the centenary of Peake's birth.

Every Sunday on the Isle of Sark, Mervyn Peake would tell his children stories about pirates, shipwrecks, and the Wild West. He illustrated his spontaneous stories with delightfully vivid drawings of the characters in his tales, but never set down words to go with them. Now, decades after Peake's death, world-renowned fantasy writer (and friend of the Peakes) Michael Moorcock has written verses to go with Peake's drawings. This star collaboration--funny, surprising, and haunting by turns--is accompanied by an illuminating and elegiac introduction by Moorcock. Overlook is publishing The Sunday Books to mark the centenary of Peake's birth, which will be commemorated around the world on July 9, 2011.

The first volume of the GORMENGHAST trilogy of fantasy novels. Titus Groan is born the heir to Gormenghast castle, and finds himself in a world predetermined by complex rituals that have been made obscure by the passage of time. Along the corridors of the castle, the child encounters some of the dark characters who will shape his life.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. 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.

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. And back in single volumes for the first time in years, a new generation of fantasy fans will grow to love this tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

As the novel opens, Titus, lord of Castle Gormenghast, has abdicated his throne. Born and brought to the edge of manhood in the huge, rotting castle, Titus rebels against the age-old ritual of which he is both lord and prisoner and rushes headlong into the world. From that moment forward, he is thrust into a stormy land of a dark imagination, where figures and landscapes loom up with force and vividness of a dream--or a nightmare.

This final installment in the Gormenghast trilogy is a fantastic triumph--a conquest awash in imagination, terror, and charm.

Mervyn Peake¹s Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream--lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson¹s disease took Peake¹s life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed.

In January of 2010, Peake¹s granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who has at last finished Peake¹s masterpiece.

It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: "With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him."

Fans of Peake will delight in this new, wonderful novel, published one hundred years after his birth, every bit as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy.