Something of a prequel to George R. R. Martin's
A Song of Ice and Fire
series,
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place in his fictional world of
Westeros about 100 years before the events of
A Game of Thrones, and collects
three novellas Martin had previously published separately about Dunk and Egg. The
former is a hedge knight - a wandering knight who doesn't owe allegiance to any
particular house or lord - and the latter his 11-year-old squire, but secretly a
prince of the ruling Targaryen family. Compared to the intrigues of the main novels
these prequels are pretty straightforward - Dunk earns his spurs at a tournament,
helps an elderly knight fend off his aggressive neighbour, and then gets caught up
in a political plot at another tournament - and not quite as full of gratuitous sex
and violence (I mean, loads of people die, several horses come to a sticky end and
someone's brains fall out, but I
did say this was in comparison to
A Song
of Ice and Fire.) It's kind of like a violent fairytale, enjoyable but Martin's
claim in the epilogue that many more Dunk and Egg stories will follow might be a bit
optimistic, given the speed at which he writes.
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