A Feast for Crows

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Image:AFeastForCrows.jpgA Feast for Crows is the fourth book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. The novel was published on October 17 2005 (U.K.) and November 8 2005 (U.S.); however, it appeared ahead of the publication date in several U.K. bookshops.

Martin's original intent was that the fourth book would be A Dance with Dragons, with the story picking up five years after the end of A Storm of Swords. That plan proved infeasible, in part due to a reliance on flashbacks. A Feast for Crows became the fourth book, with A Dance with Dragons now projected to be fifth in the series.

The finished book, furthermore, contains only some of the viewpoint characters originally intended for the volume. Martin has explained that the book was becoming too long, and could not be published as a single volume, so he decided to tell the full story of half the characters, rather than half the story of all the characters. The remaining plotlines will form the foundation of A Dance with Dragons, which is now half-completed.

Various excerpts were published in advance of the book, including a Cersei chapter in the paperback edition of A Storm of Swords, a piece set in the Iron Islands called "Arms of the Kraken" in Dragon magazine, and three Daenerys chapters published as a chapbook and given away at BookExpo 2005. One of those three Daenerys chapters, as well as an Arya chapter, a Cersei chapter (the same one that appeared in the paperback), and one of the chapters from "Arms of the Kraken," were also part of a rotation of sample chapters available online at the author's website.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The book follows a slightly different format than the three previous installments. While it has not abandoned the third-person POV, previous books focused solely on main characters and featured the narrator's name as the chapter title. A Feast For Crows has chapters from the viewpoints of non-central figures, or major characters under assumed names, and these chapters often bear that character's formal title or assumed name.

A Feast For Crows features the viewpoints of the following characters:

Prologue: Pate, a novice of the maesters in Oldtown.
The Prophet, The Drowned Man: Aeron "Damphair" Greyjoy
The Captain of the Guards: Areo Hotah, Captain of Guards to Prince Doran Martell of Dorne
Cersei Lannister
Brienne of Tarth
Samwell Tarly
Arya Stark, later referred to as "Cat of the Canals"
Jaime Lannister
Alayne Stone: Sansa Stark, pretending to be Lord Petyr Baelish's bastard daughter
The Kraken's Daughter: Asha Greyjoy
The Soiled Knight: Ser Arys Oakheart of the Kingsguard
The Iron Captain, The Reaver: Victarion Greyjoy
The Queenmaker, The Princess in the Tower: Arianne Martell

A Song of Ice and Fire

By George R. R. Martin

Characters

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Connections

Bakkalon, the Pale Child is one of the Gods worshipped mostly by soldiers at the House of Black and White. This god appeared already in Martin's 1975 story And Seven Times Never Kill Man (where he is worshipped by a religious sect called Steel Angels), as well as in some other stories of the same era.

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