Starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast. A grand miasma of doom and foreboding weaves over the sterile rituals of the castle. Villainous Steerpike seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A 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 staircase 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. The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Titus escapes for adventure, but tired and suffering from lack of food and water, he is captured by Hyena and Goat - a mysterious pair who hate each other. But both realize he will be the perfect sacrifice for Lamb who has waited many years for a mortal on which to use his diabolical art.

Titus, almost 20, flees oppressive Castle Rituals. Lost in a sandstorm, helped by Muzzlehatch owner of traveling zoo and his ex-lover Juno, stranded in big city, arrested for vagrancy, he longs for home. Nobody has heard of Gormenghast, few believe. Titus wants to prove it is real.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels are widely acknowledged to be a classic work of high fantasy, on a par with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In the Gormenghast novels, Peake created the vividly detailed world - at once gothic and surreal - of Castle Gormenghast, ruled by the noble family of Groan, whose heir is bound by the house's ancient rules and rituals. When Peake died in 1968, he left behind a few tantalizing pages of a fourth book in the series. Maeve Gilmore, Mervyn Peake's widow, wrote the present novel based on those pages left behind by Peake. Fans of the Gormenghast novels will relish this continuation of the world Peake created and the lives of unforgettable characters from the original novels, including the scheming Steerpike, Titus' sister Fuchsia, and the long-serving Dr. Prunesquallor. The book picks up the story of Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan, as he wanders through the modern world. Published exactly one hundred years after Peake's birth, this strikingly imaginative novel provides a moving coda to Peake's masterwork.

This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN13: [9780099288893](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23489373-the-gormenghast-trilogy) Gormenghast is the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. 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, manipulation and murder - a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.