George R R Martin's "A Feast Of Crows"

Finally got to read George R. R. Martin's latest book - A Feast Of Crows - Book 4 of the A Song Of Ice And Fire cycle - over the last couple of days. And what a pleasurable read it was!

This book has pretty much taken 5 (looooooooong) years to write, and considering how immensely satisfactory the previous three releases were, I was waiting for this with .. extreme anticipation and a high degree of expectation. And boy, I wasn't let down :)

While I believe that "A Feast Of Crows" is probably relatively slower paced, GRRM's near-flawless writing style is so enjoyable that it just adds to the flavour of it all. The bummer (and possibly the reason for the slower pace) though is that this is actually only half of the intended book, as it just got way too long! And interestingly, GRRM hasn't divided the book chronologically, but rather.. geographically. A Feast Of Crows deals primarily with King's Landing, the Iron Isles and Arya on Braavos, while the next book - "A Dance With Dragons" - which is already halfway complete, will deal with Daenerys and her dragons, Tyrion the Imp, Stannis, Jon et al. The second half will apparently be released next year (scheduled for February), but this is probably unlikely considering GRRM's track record :D

On the whole, an excellent excellent book that confirms GRRM's place at the top of my favourite authors list (by a distance)..

-K
P.S If it has been a while since you read the previous three books, it will probably be a good idea to give them all a quick browse to refamiliarise yourself with the characters..

Links: An entertaining webcast of GRRM's speech [Real Player], GRRM on Wikipedia.