How many A Song of Ice and Fire books are there?

In what order should the novels be read?

Read them in the order they were published, which is also the order of the story. Each of the first three books picks up where the last left off, and each widens the map: the first is mostly a story of one family and one court, the second becomes a war with several crowns in it, and the third is where the war's consequences arrive. There is no prequel to start with and no alternative reading order that the series rewards.

The one wrinkle is the fourth and fifth books, which are best understood as two halves of one long book rather than as a sequence. A reader who finishes A Feast for Crows and wonders where half the main characters have gone will find them in A Dance with Dragons, which goes back to cover the same stretch of time from their side before carrying the story onward. Read in publication order, the gap is part of the experience; the next section explains why it exists.

Why do the fourth and fifth books overlap?

Because the fourth book grew too long to publish as one volume. Rather than cut every storyline in half at the same moment, the material was divided by character and by place, so each book follows its own cast over largely the same span of time. The two can be read as parallel accounts of one stretch of the story, which the fifth book then carries forward on its own.

That choice explains the longest wait between novels so far, six years from 2005 to 2011, and it also explains why the fifth book feels different to read. Its first half is partly a catch-up on events running alongside the fourth, so its forward momentum builds slowly. Readers who come to the books after the television series sometimes find this the hardest stretch, because the show interleaved these stories rather than splitting them.

What about the books that are not out yet?

Two novels remain. The Winds of Winter is the sixth and A Dream of Spring the seventh, and both are unpublished as of the date this page was last checked. This page will not guess when either will appear, and neither should anyone writing about the series: the gaps between the published books have already been long and uneven, and a date is not a fact until a book exists.

What can be said is how the seven fit together. The series was planned as a sequence that ends with the seventh book, and the television series reached its own conclusion before the sixth was published, which is why the endings of the books and the show are still compared as an open question. Until the remaining volumes exist, the five in print are the whole of the story in the author's own telling.

Where do the companion books fit?

Several other books are set in the same world, and none of them is needed to follow the main novels. Tales of Dunk and Egg is a run of shorter stories about a hedge knight and his young squire, set roughly ninety years before the first novel; the three published so far were collected as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in 2015. They can be read at any point, and some readers use them as a lighter way into the world.

The other two are histories rather than novels. The World of Ice & Fire, from 2014, is an account of the realm's past and its regions, and Fire & Blood, from 2018, is the history of the Targaryen kings that House of the Dragon adapts; its account of the civil war first appeared in shorter form as The Princess and the Queen in 2013. Both read best after the novels, when their names and places are already familiar.