The strange abandoned cities their boat passes silently in the fog are wonderfully evocative…Ĭharles Dance as the masterful Lord Tywin Lannister in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ broadcast on Sky Atlantic © HBO

The ironical dwarf Tyrion Lannister, on the run from murdering his father Lord Tywin, is in Essos where the same magister Illyrion who sent Daenerys on her adventures, despatches him on a boat with a mystery crew down the vast river Rhoyne, introducing a whole new landscape, new peoples and languages and perils.

Whereas Dreams and Dust covers the same period of time, but follows a different set of characters: So – A Feast for Crows covered the ongoing adventures in the kingdom of Dorne (Lord Doran Martell), on the Ice Wall (Jon Snow and King Stannis Baratheon), among the Ironborn Vikings (Asha, Victarion and Euron Greyjoy), in the Riverlands (Jaime Lannister raises the siege of Riverrun), in the Vale of Arryn (Petyr Littlefinger strengthens his grip and cultivates the runaway Sansa Stark), with Samwell Tarly (accompanying the aged maester Aemon on the long sea route to the Citadel) and in King’s Landing (where Cersei Lannister’s paranoid incompetence brings disaster)… The series is now so complex and unwieldy, he has so many plotlines unravelling in all directions, that one volume simply can’t contain them all, so he needed two running in tandem. Chapters of writing this good are one of the reasons GRRM fans adore him.ĭreams and Dust – as GRRM explains in the preface – doesn’t exactly follow the ‘previous’ novel, A Feast for Crows. I’ve never read anything describing this situation and rarely read anything so vivid and powerful and cold and tangy. This, the fifth volume of George RR Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, starts with a wonderful prologue, a vivid description of a warg, a man who can enter the bodies and experience the keen sensations of animals, who is both lying shivering in a snow-covered shelter in the far North of Westeros, but also inhabiting the body of a wolf hunting with his pack, hunting fleeing, ailing humans. Only man stripped the skins from the other beasts and wore their hides and hair.

Those were man-smells too, the warg knew the stink of old skins, dead and sour, near drowned beneath the stronger scents of smoke and blood and rot.

A sigh of piney wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf. The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. The night was rank with the smell of man.

A dance with dragons 2011