BIG NEWS | A Dance With Dragons has a pub date!

According to Entertainment Weekly George R.R. Martin's long awaited A Dance With Dragons will be released July 12th in both the US by Bantam and Voyager in the UK.  The final hardcover will be over 900 pages, putting it up there with A Storm of Swords the longest in the series to date. Here is a bit from EW's interview with GRRM:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What took so long?

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I’m not sure I have a good answer. If I did, I would have taken less time. It’s enormous. It’s as long as A Storm of Swords. It’s very complicated. I have a lot of characters and points of view. And I’ve been doing a ton of rewriting, trying to get it where I wanted it to be. Some of these chapters I’ve rewritten more times than I can count before I’m satisfied with them.

Apparently the date is very firm.  And George R. R. Martin has confirmed the date as we on his site:

Meanwhile... there is news. Big news. The end is in sight, at long long last, and we're close enough so that my editors and publishers at Bantam Spectra have set an actual publication date.

This date is different. This date is real.

The dragons are coming. Prepare to dance.

Is it super geeky that I just put the date in my calendar?  Let the re-reads begin!

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