"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." - C.S. Lewis "One of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets , The Unquiet Grave , Brideshead Revisited , The Loved One , Animal Farm and 1984 ." - Anthony Burgess "His novels, said Burgess, are "aggressively three-dimensional. showing the poet as well as the draughtsman. It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness' there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions.

He is always exact. [ Titus Groan ] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.'' - Anthony Burgess "Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word.

A word of warning, however: this one takes its time. Most readers are used to more watery offerings -- this is thick, creamy and extra-rich." - Guardian , Carlos Ruiz-Zafron.