A Game of Thrones
The founding volume of the dominant fantasy work of its era: Locus winner, Hugo-winning novella within (Blood of the Dragon), and source of HBO's Game of Thrones, which made Westeros a global lingua franca.
Book Entry · Fantasy
A Storm of Swords
by George R. R. Martin · 2000 · A Song of Ice and Fire, book 3
What is A Storm of Swords about?
The War of the Five Kings reaches its butcher's-bill volume: the Red Wedding — fantasy's most infamous single scene, planned by Martin from the start and withheld until readers loved the victims — alongside the Purple Wedding's poisoned answer, Jaime Lannister's redemption-by-amputation in Brienne's company, Jon Snow among the wildlings, Daenerys's sack of the slaver cities and a duel between the Mountain and the Red Viper that no reader has ever recovered from. The series' high-water mark: maximum momentum, maximum cruelty, and every cruelty a consequence with a paper trail.
Why it matters
Locus winner and Hugo finalist, near-universally ranked the saga's peak; the Red Wedding episode ('The Rains of Castamere') became a global television trauma in 2013 and the standard demonstration of Martin's contract with the reader.
Where does it sit in the series?
Westeros: a throne of melted swords, winter coming, dragons returning and nobody safe. The saga that retrained epic fantasy's expectations and conquered television as Game of Thrones.
In the Guide from A Song of Ice and Fire:
- A Game of Thrones (1996)
- A Storm of Swords (2000)
Read next
The Blade Itself
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.
Gardens of the Moon
The most famous deep-end opening in fantasy and the launch of the genre's most ambitious completed epic: the ten-volume Book of the Fallen, delivered at a book a year, redefined what scale and difficulty a mainstream series could sustain.