What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? In the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes written by a husband to his wife passes into the keeping of a hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.

I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you.

The six recipients - a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor - inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one's wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light.

As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder.

Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake’s widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groan—it is an enrichment and deepening of that book.

The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.