This one takes the cake! However excellent readers found his previous volumes, Martin's A Storm of Swords surpasses them all by leaps and bounds (as impossible as that may seem)!

This is truly epic stuff--I always stayed up too late to read this, so had to force myself to bed for health's sake...but I found I had trouble sleeping, because quite frankly, the novel's storyline and characters kept flip-flopping through my head. Will Arya ever find her way back? What is Dany doing? How the hell will Robb get out of this one? The suspense this series oozes will become as a drug...the trials that each character faces becomes truly personal...you just want things to work out so bad!

Just looking back, I would that if there were a list of the top 10 scenes thus far, 7 alone would come from this book. "Jaw-dropping" does not even begin to describe some of the things that come to pass.

As a last note, perhaps most interesting is the new Jaime POV. Readers have come to despise this character, but Martin really humanizes him, proving with a certainty that it is difficult to hate someone after at last seeing things the other way around. A wonderful change in perspective, and expertly done.

Highly recommended!