As the novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born. He stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle. 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. Dreamlike and macabre, Peake's extraordinary novel is one of the most astonishing and fantastic works in modern English fiction.

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...

-A gloriously impossible realization of Mervyn Peake's soaring flight of fancy.---Guardian

In a world bound by iron laws and dead rituals, two young men are struggling to make their way: Steerpike, the renegade kitchen-boy who seduces and murders his way up the social ladder, and Titus Groan, heir to Gormenghast, who comes to threaten its very existence.