Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

Titus Groan, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born. A Groan of the strict lineage, he will inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its surrounding kingdom. His world will be predetermined by complex rituals, the origins of which are lost in time, and peopled by the dark characters who inhabit the half-lit corridors - Lord Sepulchrave and his red-haired Countess; Swelter the chef and his bony enemy Flay; Prunesquallor, the castle physician, and his etiolated sister Irma; and Steerpike, the Machiavellian youth.

Dreamlike, fantastic and macabre, Mervyn Peake's extraordinary novel is one of the most astonishingly sustained flights of the imagination in modern English fiction.