A Feast for Crows

A Feast for Crows was published in October 2005 as the fourth of the seven novels George R. R. Martin planned for A Song of Ice and Fire. The manuscript had grown too large to publish as one book, and Martin and his publishers split it by location rather than cutting it in half chronologically, which produced two novels taking place at the same time with different casts. The companion volume, A Dance with Dragons, followed in 2011 and runs alongside this one before moving past it.

The effect of that decision is a book with a deliberately narrower set of viewpoints than its predecessors. Daenerys, Jon Snow and Tyrion are absent because their stories are being told in the other volume, which means this novel stays in King's Landing, the riverlands, the Iron Islands, Dorne and the Reach. Cersei Lannister's chapters are the spine of the political story, and the book is the first to spend sustained time inside the head of a character whose judgement is this bad.

The split changed how the series reads for anyone coming to it in order. Readers who want the war, the north and the east have to wait for the companion volume, and this book's narrower focus is the price of the two novels being published separately rather than in sequence. Martin's series is the best-known example of the long-form fantasy that followed Tolkien and then reacted against him: a large cast, a world with centuries of history behind it, and no guarantee that the people who behave well will survive. A Feast for Crows was adapted into the fifth season of the television series Game of Thrones alongside material from the next novel, and a limited illustrated edition was published in 2005.