Mass Market Paperback, 1061 pages
English language
Published July 15, 2006 by Spectra.
Crows will fight over a dead man's flesh, and kill each other for his eyes.
Bloodthirsty, treacherous and cunning, the Lannisters are in power on the Iron Throne in the name of the boy-king Tommen. The war in the Seven Kingdoms has burned itself out, but in its bitter aftermath new conflicts spark to life.
The Martells of Dorne and the Starks of Winterfell seek vengeance for their dead. Euron Crow's Eye, as black a pirate as ever raised a sail, returns from the smoking ruins of Valyria to claim the Iron Isles. From the icy north, where Others threaten the Wall, apprentice Maester Samwell Tarly brings a mysterious babe in arms to the Citadel.
Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory will go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel and the coldest hearts.
"We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption."
The best bits are when a 'lowborn' (a dispossessed) gets the change to point out to a 'highborn' (a privileged) 'this is what happens to us when you lot play your game of thrones'. So universal and timeless.
Now, on with the merciless critique:
Endless lists and descriptions of things that seem to have no relevance for the scene in question, or anywhere else in the book for that matter. Then into the action, which has to be explained by flashback of events that happened in the past, some times interlaced so much with the 'present' that you don't know if you are in the room described or in the fields years ago.
Then the chapter stops in the middle of the action, or in the middle of a conversation, to leave you in a 'cliffhanger'.
The next chapter that will relate to that character will be a few chapters …
The best bits are when a 'lowborn' (a dispossessed) gets the change to point out to a 'highborn' (a privileged) 'this is what happens to us when you lot play your game of thrones'. So universal and timeless.
Now, on with the merciless critique:
Endless lists and descriptions of things that seem to have no relevance for the scene in question, or anywhere else in the book for that matter. Then into the action, which has to be explained by flashback of events that happened in the past, some times interlaced so much with the 'present' that you don't know if you are in the room described or in the fields years ago.
Then the chapter stops in the middle of the action, or in the middle of a conversation, to leave you in a 'cliffhanger'.
The next chapter that will relate to that character will be a few chapters afterwards (or maybe a book later) and will invariably start again with a lengthy description of places, clothes and food, only to start off new action or dialogue months after that cliffhanger, about which you will find out (or not) in between paragraphs relating to current and past events.
However: an accurate depiction of how politics work in real life. Once you get used and over those shortcomings, I see it as a kind of 1984 only set in the past in order to explain how politics - and all human relations for that matter - work. From what I know of History, it is well applicable to nowadays politics and also all the way back to the time humankind settled down to plant food efficiently so that some privileged could spend time doing other, more fun, less useful things, while generally living a lot better.
