First Lines Friday – 09/10/2020

Happy Friday everyone and thank you for joining me in today’s First Lines Friday post! On Sunday I promised a spectacular feature in today’s post and I hope you won’t be disappointed. I for one think this could be one of the best books on my TBR right now.

This book is affiliated with a main, well-known series that I talk about a lot here on Reviewsfeed. If I had to choose one book series to read for the rest of my life, this would be it! So, am I biased about how good this week’s book is? Yes. Do I care? Not one bit! My blog and my rules, right?!

So, without further adieu, here is this week’s extract: –

 

The maesters of the citadel who keep the histories of Westeros have used Aegon’s Conquest as their touchstone for the past three hundred years. Births, deaths, battles, and other events are dated either AC (After the Conquest) or BC (Before the Conquest).

True scholars know that such dating is far from precise. Aegon Targaryen’s conquest of the Seven Kingdoms did not take place in a single day. More than two years passed between Aegon’s landing and his Oldtown coronation… and even then the conquest remained incomplete, since Dorne remained unsubdued. Sporadic attempts to bring the Dornishmen into the realm continued all through King Aegon’s reign and well into the reigns of his sons, making it impossible to fix a precise end date for the Wars of Conquest.

 

 

If you know me or recognise those names you probably have a good idea as to what today’s book is!

 

Fire and Blood – George R. R. Martin

Goodreads – Fire & Blood

With all the fire and fury fans have come to expect from internationally bestselling author George R. R. Martin, this is the first volume of the definitive two-part history of the Targaryens in Westeros.

Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire and Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire and Blood is the ultimate game of thrones, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros.

 

I love everything A Game of Thrones (aka A Song of Ice and Fire) and if you are a regular reader, you may know that I completed my re-read of the published books in the series earlier this year. Now with the TV series over too I need to get my fix of fire and blood somewhere!

I am a huge fan of novels and series’ with detailed backstories to the current narrative. The main series itself is rich in detail to the events that lead up to the wars/struggles we read in those books. I always thought the history of the world was so detailed that it could be a story in its own right… and now it is!

This book has over 600 pages of the history of Westeros to dive into, and judging by the synopsis Fire and Blood goes into more detail about events that are only ‘comparatively’ touched on in the series, such as the Doom of Valyria. I can’t wait to read this – I hope it’s every bit as good as the rest of the books. I don’t have any real reason to doubt why it wouldn’t be!

 

What did you think of today’s First Lines Friday post? As always, I would love to hear from you!

 

 

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