A Song of Ice and Fire is told through the eyes of characters who are sometimeshundreds or even thousands of miles apart from one another. Some chapters cover a day, someonly an hour; others might span a fortnight, a month, half a year. With such a structure, thenarrative cannot be strictly sequential; sometimes important things are happeningsimultaneously, a thousand leagues apart.

In the case of the volume now in hand, the reader should realize that the openingchapters of A Storm of Swords do not follow the closing chapters of A Clash of Kings so much asoverlap them. I open with a look at some of the things that were happening on the Fist of theFirst Men, at Riverrun, Harrenhal, and on the Trident while the Battle of the Blackwater wasbeing fought at King’s Landing, and during its aftermath...


GEORGE R. R. MARTIN