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Shop nowTitus Groan
The Gormenghast Trilogy: Book #1
Narrator
Robert Whitfield
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Length
17 hours 32 minutes
Language
English
A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and an array of bizarre creatures haunt the world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. Peake has created a world where all is like a dream—lush, fantastical, vivid, and yet symbolic of a dark struggle.
At the center of everything is the seventy-seventh earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom. 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. When Titus is crowned, he is called "Child-Inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways…Child-Inheritor of the spring breezes that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing."
Mervyn Laurence Peake (1911–1968) is an author best known for his Gormenghast fantasy fiction trilogy. He also published illustrated verse and short stories for children, plays, short stories, and novels. He was awarded the W. H. Heinemann Foundation Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. He was born and raised in China until the age of eleven. He went on to study at the Royal Academy School in London, where he developed as an artist, designer, and writer. He worked as an artist on the island of Sark for several years and then returned to London to hold several exhibitions of his artwork.
Simon Vance is the critically acclaimed narrator of approximately 400 audiobooks, winner of 27 AudioFile Earphones Awards, and a 12-time Audie Award-winner. He won an Audie in 2006 in the category of Science Fiction and was named the 2011 Best Voice in Biography and History and in 2010 Best Voice in Fiction by AudioFile magazine.
Vance has been a narrator for the past 25 years, and also worked for many years as a BBC Radio presenter and newsreader in London. Some of his best-selling and most praised audiobook performances include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (an Audie award-winner), Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series (all 21 titles), the new productions of Frank Herbert’s original Dune series, and Rob Gifford’s China Road (an AudioFile 2007 Book of the Year). Vance lives near San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
Reviews
“[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”
“Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work…A classic of our age.”
“[Simon Vance] is calm and fastidious-voiced in third person narration, giving us time to revel in the book’s surreal description and ghastly ambience…In the book’s dialogue, however, he takes on the Gormenghast menagerie with brio and versatility, giving each character a distinctive, appropriate voice…Overall his narration is a masterly rendition of a lurid and haunting work.”
“A darkly humorous, stunningly complex tale…This true classic is a feast of words unlike anything else in the world of fantasy. Those who explore Gormenghast castle will be richly rewarded.”
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