The Overlook Press has acquired the U.S. rights to publish Mervyn Peake’s final Gormenghast novel, tentatively titled Titus Awakes, in 2011, the centenary of Peake’s birth.
Peake’s celebrated Gormenghast Trilogy, telling of the adventures the Earl of Groan Titus in his gothic castle Gormenghast, is considered a classic of modern fantasy fiction. The three books Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone are currently available in trade paperback editions from Overlook.
Peake died in 1968, leaving a fourth novel in progress. His wife, the writer and artist Maeve Gilmore, began writing the book in 1970 but her completed manuscript was only recently discovered by their granddaughter in a South London attic. Maeve Gilmore died in 1983. Overlook Publisher Peter Mayer acquired the novel last week, adding to Overlook’s backlist of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast works. Overlook also published Malcolm Yorke’s acclaimed biography, Mervyn Peake.
Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in revolutionary China, where his parents were missionaries. He later drew on his exotic childhood and its often savage images in his adult creations. Throughout his life, he was a bohemian: as a student and then, later, in an artists' colony on the island of Sark, a place to which he often returned when city life became too stressful or expensive. Teaching in London, he fell in love with one of his students, Maeve Gilmore, and the two married despite her family's opposition. It turned out to be a close and lasting relationship, lived among a circle of friends that included Graham Greene, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas, and Walter de la Mare. Peake proved to be a miserable and incompetent soldier during World War II, and it was during this unhappy period that he began to write Titus Groan, the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy. In 1945 he was sent by a magazine to Germany, where he visited the Bergen Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation an experience that would profoundly affect his subsequent work.
Titus Awakes, by Meryvn Peake and Maeve Gilmore, will be published by The Overlook Press in July 2011.
