Saturday 9th July 2011 4 - 8 pm
- TITUS AWAKES LAUNCH -
Exhibition Opening and Titus Awakes Launch

To celebrate the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth on 9th July 1911, Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc is delighted to host the launch of Titus Awakes, the recently rediscovered sequel to the Gormenghast Series, at this exhibition opening exactly 100 years later. The fourth installment in the Gormenghast saga continues the story of Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan, as he wanders in the modern world and finds his final resting place in Sark.

The Gormenghast series is often wrongly called a trilogy, but was in fact intended to be a longer series, charting Titus's life from cradle to grave. Titus Awakes was written by Maeve Gilmore shortly after her husband's death from Parkinson's Disease in 1968, and is formed from a page and a half of fragmented notes that Peake left to her, detailing how he wanted the story to continue. Maeve died in 1983 and the existence of her manuscript, handwritten in brown ink on four exercise books, remained unknown until Sebastian Peake's daughter discovered them in the attic of the family home.

Sebastian Peake believes that the ending of Titus Awakes shows Titus return to Sark in the Channel Islands, where they had lived in the 1940s and "where the family was at its happiest." He has said that, "Titus metamorphosises into Mervyn Peake and comes home to where he wants to be." Sebastian believes that his mother penned the story partly because she was so involved in Peake's writing, and partly as a cathartic exercise to release her husband from the bonds of the disease that had blighted the last decade of his life and prevented him from continuing the tale.

The opening will be in the presence of Sebastian Peake who will be giving a reading from Titus Awakes, as well as signing copies.

Titus Awakes is published by Vintage, who are also bringing out a new illustrated edition of the original Gormenghast Trilogy which features over 100 illustrations by Mervyn Peake, the majority of which are from his sketchbooks and have not been seen before. You will be able to buy your copies at the launch event on the 9th July between 4-8pm.

Gormenghast is a tour de force that ranks as one of the Twentieth Century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. According to C.S.Lewis, "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."