"A Game of Thrones" George R. R. Martin

"Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him." p.22

That place, when a person can be brave, is where "A Game of Thrones" takes place. This story, and these characters, came into my life like a thundestorm. Full of loud, booming, natural beauty-- difficult to forget, this brilliantly plotted and populated epic is truly a modern classic. Before reading this first novel, having seen the HBO television adaptation, I had dismissed the series as not something I would normally read. What Martin does here is nothing short of epic, brilliant and all the like terms that get tossed around. Using ideas, terrain and creatures we have seen before-- knights, dragons, kings and queens-- he expertly tips convention on its head, and makes a kind of fairy tale, for adults, that will have you turning page after page. 

There is so much going on in this book, and that is the best of things. It is the far exception in this densely populated book that a character is not instantly and immensensely memorable. These women and men-- Ned, Catelyn, Arya, Robb, Sansa and Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys-- are so human, and so many shades of heroes and villians and everything in between. We see this story playing out across kingdoms and nations, from so many different eyes-- from the eyes of our presuemed heroes, the Starks; our presumed villians, the Lannisters, a host of others; and the exiled girl at the edges of the world who just might have the power to save the world. The way they are played and reveal themselves in the plot, each chapter from another's point of view, makes this a great work of the human condition, politics and history that just so happens to include the possibility of dragons and other magic. 

I could not love this story more.