Mervyn Peake, “Titus Groan”

Seventy-six generations of stone, silence and ritual. Then a child is born.

Titus, seventy-seventh Earl of Groan, comes into the world in a castle so vast that no one has ever seen all of it, and so bound by tradition that every moment of every day has been decided centuries before. Around his cradle move a melancholy lord lost among his books, a countess who loves only her birds and cats, a dreaming sister, two servants locked in a deadly feud.

And a kitchen boy named Steerpike, who climbs out of the steam onto the roofs of Gormenghast and looks down on it all with a cold, patient ambition.

A gothic masterpiece, grotesque and enchanting, Titus Groan is the first of the Gormenghast novels: a world built of shadows and ceremonies, and one of the great imaginative achievements of English literature.