by George R.R. Martin (2013)
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Picture this: a hulking hedge knight named Ser Duncan the Tall, all seven feet of him crammed into ill-fitting plate armor, thunders across the lists at Ashford Meadow, his splintered lance aimed at a princeling’s chest. The crowd roars, mud flies, and you feel it—the raw jolt of a joust gone wrong, the crack of wood and bone that sends a man sprawling. That’s the pulse of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R.R. Martin’s collection of three novellas that plunge you into Westeros a century before the dragons died, where chivalry hangs by a frayed thread and every tourney hides a dagger.
Dunk and his squire Egg—scruffy boy with a bald pate and a secret that could topple thrones—wander the backroads of the Seven Kingdoms during the uneasy reign of Aegon IV’s fat shadow. In “The Hedge Knight,” Dunk blunders into the grand melee at Ashford, befriends a puppeteer, and faces off against the arrogant Duncan the Small in a Trial of Seven that leaves you breathless, bloodied shields clashing under a merciless sun. Then “The Sworn Sword” drags you into a parched river feud between the Blackwoods and Brackens, where oaths shatter like dry clay and Dunk grapples with loyalty’s bitter cost. By “The Mystery Knight,” disguises and pretenders swarm a muddy tourney, and you savor the sly twists as Egg’s quick wit unravels plots thicker than tourney fog.
What hits different here? Martin’s main saga sprawls with scheming kings and ice zombies, but this is intimate grit—two outsiders hustling for scraps in a world of tarnished crowns. No wall-to-wall slaughter; instead, the ache of honest hunger, the glow of campfire tales, the electric thrill when Dunk swings his massive sword or Egg drops a Targaryen bombshell. It’s Martin’s Westeros at its most alive and human, laced with bawdy humor and heartbreaking what-ifs, like echoes of the kingsguard vows that shaped Jaime Lannister later on.
If you craved the road-worn bond between Arya and the Hound in A Game of Thrones, or the scrappy underdogs of The Name of the Wind, this is your fix—pure adventure with Martin’s knife-edge realism, minus the endless winters.
Crack it open tonight; Dunk’s already saddling up, and the Seven Kingdoms need a tall tale like yours.
Author portrait: Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America | License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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