George R.R. Martin offers fans a glimpse into his upcoming novel, The Winds of Winter, with an excerpt featuring the character Alayne, better known as Sansa Stark.

The sneak peek, announced on Martin’s blog yesterday, reveals the once battered and cowed Sansa to be still at the Eyrie, hiding out as “Alayne,” the bastard daughter of Littlefinger, and caught up in another of his plots to seduce a man. Alayne seems to be more than holding her own now, telling her would-be suitor on the eve of a tourney, “I hope you joust better than you talk.”

Martin released another excerpt last year. It was so popular it crashed his site.

There is no firm news on when Martin hopes to complete The Winds of Winter but he has been clearing his schedule to devote more time to the long anticipated novel. Note: the cover we show here may not be the official one. It appears all over the internet, including on Entertainment Weekly’s site, but seems to have originated as fan art. UPDATE: We checked with the publisher, who confirms the cover is NOT official.

The showrunners of the HBO series based on his books recently announced that they will begin to outpace Martin’s story after the upcoming season, leaving fans to pick between spoiler-viewing or waiting for Martin to catch up.

The fifth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones begins on April 12.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2015 at 9:18 am and is filed under Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.