A Storm of Swords (Part One) - Steel and Snow: Book 3 of A Song of Ice and Fire

KRITIKERSTIMMEN:

George R.R. Martin's superb and highly acclaimed epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire continues with the third in the series A Storm of Swords. There is passion here, and misery and charm, grandeur and squalor, tragedy, nobility and courage. Unabridged and split into two parts. The Seven Kingdoms are divided by revolt and blood feud, and winter approaches like an angry beast. Beyond the Northern borders, wildlings leave their villages to gather in the ice and stone wasteland of the Frostfangs. From there, the renegade Brother Mance Rayder will lead them South towards the Wall.

The men of the Night's Watch are ready for the coming of a great cold and the walking corpses that travel with it. But now they face a horde of wildlings twenty-thousand strong - hungry savage people steeped in the dark magic of the haunted wilderness - poised to invade the Kingdom of the North where Robb Stark wears his new-forged crown. But Robb's defences are ranged against attack from the South, the land of House Stark's enemies the Lannisters. His sisters are trapped there, dead or likely yet to die, at the whim of the Lannister boy-king Joffrey or his depraved mother Cersei, regent of the Iron Throne. Cersei's ambition is unfettered while the dwarf Tyrion Lannister fights for his life, a victim of treachery. And on the other side of the ocean, the last of the Targaryens rears the dragons she hatched from her husband's funeral pyre. Daenerys Stormborn will return to the land of her birth to avenge the murder of her father, the last Dragon King on the Iron Throne.

©2011 George R. R. Martin (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers Limited