' TITUS AWAKES '

Titus Awakes is the editorial title applied to a novel being planned by Mervyn Peake at the time he became too ill to write, about 1960. It was to have been the fourth novel in the Gormenghast series, after Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Titus Awakes remained unfinished, as the author succumbed to illness before the work could be completed.

In the mid-1970s Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore, wrote a version of Titus Awakes which she named Search Without End. Complete, it runs to 65000 words.

Early in 2010 Sebastian Peake announced that his daughter had found Maeve Gilmore's notebook MS of Titus Awakes in the family's attic. He hopes to have the new book published in 2011 (the 100th anniversary of Mervyn Peake's birth). He says it follows Titus's journeyings in the wider world, finally reaching an island that Peake identifies as Sark, where the Peake family lived from 1946 to 1949, and sees Titus himself become Mervyn Peake.

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