Game of Thrones

A Song Of Fire And Ice Book One

George R R Martin

‘When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground’Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun.

From the fertile south, where heat breeds conspiracy, to the vast and savage eastern lands, all the way to the frozen north, kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men . . . all will play the Game of Thrones.

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This book is fantastic; I honestly don’t think there’s any other way to describe it. This is an incredibly complex story, only the first part of it in fact because it’s a 7 book series, with some of the best and most realised characters in fiction as far as I’m concerned.

The story is told from the perspective of multiple characters, and they are all given equal ‘screen’ time, with every chapter showing events as seen through the eyes of someone different. Because of this, you occasionally see the same incident from different angles, and the result is that no-one is painted as entirely black or white, and the more you read the more you learn about the characters, and the more you want to learn.

I like some characters – Tyrion and Ayra being my favourites – more than others, but they’re all really well written, as are the situations they get involved in, which are set in vastly different locations.

Some scenes may disturb readers because of the violence they describe but this is hard fantasy, and the type of world described is one that used to exist, which helps to make this book so good.