Mervyn Peake Ordre des livres

Originally published in 1946, this little treatise on the simple art of pencil drawing is the perfect antidote to the myriad 'how-to' books that fill the bookshelves.

In Titus Awakes the 77th Earl of Groan leaves the crumbling castle of Gormenghast and finds the larger world even stranger than his birthplace. Using notes and the fragments he left behind, his wife, the painter and writer Maeve Gilmore, has created a richly imagined sequel that fans of The Gormenghast Trilogy will delight in.

After falling down a rabbit hole and stepping through a mirror, Alice experiences unusual adventures with a variety of nonsensical characters.

A story of the macabre and the chasms of the imagination. A gormenghast story. Older readers.

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.

Brilliant, disturbing, fantastical and addicitive, Mervyn Peake at one time or another during his brief life touched on almost every literary form. For the aficionado and for the first-time reader, this selection of his less well-known works offers a treasure trove. It includes a wealth of short stories, poems, nonsense verse and drawings - all of them adding new perspectives on this prolific and astonishingly original writer.

I am now many miles further to the North-East and am writing from a cave in a gaunt hillside. When Jackson and I sat down to rest we could see our footprints stretching back to the edge of the world. . . . 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 his destiny: the awesome and mysterious White Lion. Illustrated on every page with stunning, beautiful, eerie drawings, this edition has been completely re-originated form the original artwork. Reproduced here for the first time in full colour, Letters from a Lost Uncle is the triumphant product of a unique imagination and a distillation of all that is most powerful in the strange genius of Mervyn Peake.