A Dance with Dragons

Book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire

By: George R.R. Martin

Narrated by: Roy Dotrice

Length: 48 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

The complete, unabridged audiobook of A Dance with Dragons.

HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones is based on George R. R. Martin’s internationally best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire, the greatest fantasy epic of the modern age. A Dance with Dragons is the fifth volume in the series.

The future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance.

In the east, Daenerys, last scion of House Targaryen, her dragons grown to terrifying maturity, rules as queen of a city built on dust and death, beset by enemies.

Now that her whereabouts are known many are seeking Daenerys and her dragons. Among them the dwarf Tyrion Lannister, who has escaped King’s Landing with a price on his head, wrongfully condemned to death for the murder of his nephew, King Joffrey. But not before killing his hated father, Lord Tywin.

To the north lies the great Wall of ice and stone - a structure only as strong as those guarding it. Eddard Stark's bastard son Jon Snow has been elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, but he has enemies both in the Watch and beyond the Wall, where the wildling armies are massing for an assault.

On all sides bitter conflicts are reigniting, played out by a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves. The tides of destiny will inevitably lead to the greatest dance of all....

©2011 George R. R. Martin (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"In the grand epic fantasy tradition, Martin is by far the best...tense, surging, insomnia-inflicting." (Time magazine)

"An absorbing, exciting read.... Martin's style is so vivid that you will be hooked within a few pages." (The Times)

"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)

Worst I heard until now 😠

What a horror to listen to this "performance" what the hack is wrong with you mr dotrice? Couldn't you at least TRY to recreate the characters voices like you did in the last books? Bad enough that a lot of main persons are COMPLETELY unrecognisable! Now I've come a little longer In the story and Giant changes his voice 180degrees in between two sentences!!!
Jeez what a disappointment!!!
Shame on you to give out such a poor audiobook!!!

Boring

This book was like reading a phone book and a menu. Dull new characters introduced rather than progress the storyline of any of the interesting ones.

Story was great, voice actor, not so much

Any additional comments?

Roy Dotrice was going superbly with the character voices from the previous books. But now he's gone and mixed up the accents of so many of the characters (both major and minor) that it's sometimes hard to know who is speaking. This has not ruined my overall experience of the series but it's taken me out of the story so often that it's been a little disappointing.

That said, it's GoT, I'm hooked. And there are some great story developments and surprises and an awesome satisfying event that will keep me waiting desperately for the next installment.

Roy Dotrice is a disgrace

I am only half way through part 1. I am enjoying the story so far, but may alter my rating after I finish the whole story.

The narrator is fine with male characters and absolutely awful with female characters. He has one female voice-- shriveled old crone. This works fine when the character happens to be a shriveled old crone, but for Daenerys? The narrator didn't do his homework and is showing his lack of range.

A series with such potential…

A Dance with Dragons is the fifth book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I did not enjoy this instalment. The author split this book (along with the previous one being a Feast for Crows) geographically. You follow a certain group of characters from book 3, only hear about half of them in book 4, and the other half in book 5. In this book, most of the stories you were following from book 4 are not even mentioned, and the ones continuing from book 3 (a storm of swords) you would have forgotten about since it was thousands of pages ago. There is still no news of the next book in the series, which is unfortunately disheartening given that I am now 5 books in. Perhaps if you haven’t started reading/listening yet, don’t until/unless the stories are actually expected to finish. There are some great moments in the series, but mostly not worth the trouble.
 
The narration by Roy is the only thing that got me through this book. He is an epic performer.

Great story, but please bring back Roy Avers !

In summary: Great story; horrible narration.

Like many others here, I found Roy Dotrice to be painful to listen to. Half of his characters sound like stereotyped pirates! I was half-expecting to hear him shout "Avast!" from time to time.

Some of you may not be aware that, besides Roy Dotrice, Roy Avers also narrated Books 1 & 3 of the series. (John Lee narrated Book 4).

Having listened to all of the books in this series several times (and by all three narrators), I had really hoped that George RR Martin would have asked Roy Avers to read this, the 5th book, for us. Roy Avers has a much greater range of different voices for each of the characters. At times, it seemed as though he snuck his daughter in to read the parts of Arya and Sansa. Roy Avers also changes his reading pace to suit the mood of each part of the story. He reads faster when there is action, and slows-down and lowers his voice when characters are trying to be unobtrusive. This is something that Roy Dotrice could learn from.

Given a choice, I'd prefer to listen to Roy Avers instead of Roy Dotrice (or John Lee - who narrated the 4th book).

The story itself was very good. There were several surprises. However, the plot tended to drag along slowly at times (as it did in Book 4). As much as I like his writing style, sometimes I would have enjoyed the story more if Martin had got things moving a little quicker and not have let the characters stories draw-out needlessly.

I'm certainly looking forward to the next book. This series is still my favourite above all others, despite the horrible narration of Roy Dotrice and John Lee.

If I had one dying wish, it would be to have the completed Ice & Fire series finally completed by Martin and all books read by Roy Avers.

Not as good as the rest of GoT Books

The 5th and as yet final installment of GoT books. A bit slow and not as enthralling as the first 4 books. I struggled to maintain my interest in this book. Also disappointing that is the last book but TV series has surpassed book 5.

Lenghty

Not a huge fan of this installment. The storyline wades through a mountain of background details and chitchat, so the progress is slow. Roy is as brilliant as ever.

80% is just filler conversations

There is so much wasted time in this book. How many mundane and pointless conversations can anyone possibly have. None of the characters are doing anything of note. Nothing interesting had happened since the end of book 3

Narrator is terrible

Roy Dotrice has been incredibly inconsistent throughout the whole series (changing voices, changing the way he pronounces names) but his new voices in this book are the most baffling so far. Why does Daenerys sound like an old woman now??? Shame on us for continuing to buy this version (so they have no reason to fix it). Its unacceptably bad.