Game of Thrones: how will Winds of Winter regain the suspense stolen by the show?

For those reading George RR Martin’s fantasy series, HBO’s dramatisation has been thrilling – but now it’s ahead of the books, it will be work hard to surprise us

Spoiler alert: this blog assumes you’ve seen episode ten of Game of Thrones season six. Do not read on unless you have

Another year, another season of Game of Thrones on television. If only the books arrived at such a steady pace. The first book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, came out 20 years ago this September. The succeeding volumes have each taken five years or so to produce, to the ire of fans. “People yell at you and say: ‘We want the next book right away.’ They’re like babies,” Stephen King said to Martin in a public interview last week. I don’t mind settling for a new instalment every five years – they’re meaty, good to reread, and frankly, too damn time-consuming to pick up every 12 months.

But I must admit I was less happy when Martin announced in January that he had missed the deadline of 31 December 2015, which would have allowed book six, The Winds of Winter, to come out before the TV show embarked on storylines not yet reached in the books. The HBO series thus became a weird mishmash of new and old news, with the vast majority of events coming from book five, A Dance With Dragons, but with some sudden leaps into the unknown, possibly from The Winds of Winter – or even book seven, A Dream of Spring. In the books, Jon is still lying stabbed on the floor in the Black Keep, Cersei hasn’t gone all Godfather on King’s Landing yet, and Arya is still training with the Faceless Men – all of which is in the distant past now for the TV characters.

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