Titus Awakes is an early working title applied to a novel planned by Mervyn Peake about 1960, before he became too ill to write. It was to have been the fourth novel in the Gormenghast series, after Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone.
Peake's own version of Titus Awakes is unfinished, as the author died in 1968 without doing any more than starting it. But his widow, Maeve Gilmore, attempted to complete it, and produced two different versions of her interpretation. A reduced version was seen by a reviewer in the 1970s, Watney edited
Critical reception
This unfinished work is not well-known even among readers of Peake's other works, having been published only by Overlook Press (albeit in both single volume and omnibus editions).
comments on the irony of the narrator's comment that "Titus would never again see Gormenghast Castle", since "even in the first proposed chapter, Titus returns in a dream to Gormenghast and the fight between Swelter and Flay". Although it is not entirely clear that the textual repetition is an error, the repetition in the pre-adventure led reviewer Chris Sandow to comment "[t]he fragments are clearly no more than early drafts".
's ventures the opinion that Gilmore's manuscript Search Without End that he had been given earlier had been redacted from its original to remove dependence on back-references to the Gormenghast trilogy. In June 2011, Gilmore's earlier version of book was published by Overlook Press as Titus Awakes: The lost book of Gormenghast, on the 100th anniversary of Mervyn Peake's birth.