Robb Stark may be King in the North, but he must bend to the will of the old tyrant Walder Frey if he is to hold his crown. And while his youngest sister, Arya, has escaped the clutches of the depraved Cersei Lannister and her son, the capricious boy-king Joffrey, Sansa Stark remains their captive. Meanwhile, across the ocean, Daenerys Stormborn, the last heir of the Dragon King, delivers death to the slave-trading cities of Astapor and Yunkai as she approaches Westeros with vengeance in her heart. ?Of those who work in the grand epic fantasy tradition, George R. R. Martin is by far the best? - Time Magazine ?Colossal, staggering? all the intoxicating complexity of the Wars of the Roses or Imperial Rome? - SFX ?The sheer mind-boggling scope of this epic has sent other fantasy writers away shaking their heads? Its ambition: to construct the Twelve Caesars of fantasy fiction, with characters so venomous they could eat the Borgias? - Guardian.
