The Winds of Winter is not coming out in 2022

Thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon, people are talking about Westeros again. It seems as good a time as any to check in on George R.R. Martin’s long-in-coming new book The Winds of Winter, the upcoming sixth installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Game of Thrones is based on A Song of Ice and Fire, but it only got through five or so seasons before it ran out of source material. While Martin has put out five books in the series so far, he still at least two more to go, and the sixth has been an extremely long time in coming. The last book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, hit book shelves in 2011, over a decade ago.

So is The Winds of Winter on the horizon? Martin is closer to finishing that he’s ever been, but there’s still no end in sight for the wait.

George R.R. Martin is “three quarters of the way done” with The Winds of Winter

“It’s a big, big book,” Martin recently said of The Winds of Winter. “I’ve said that before, it’s a challenging book. It’s probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series. A Dance with Dragons and A Storm of Swords are the two largest books of the series, they were about 1,500 manuscript pages, I think this one is going to be longer than that by the time I finish it.”

"And I think I’m about 3/4 of the way done maybe, but that’s not 100% done so I have to continue to work on it."

Martin has never stopped making progress on the book over the years, but that progress has been agonizingly slow. The fact that he’s been talking so openly about it more recently may bode well. Perhaps the final fourth will come quicker than the first three, but however fast he writes, there’s no way he finishes by the end of this year. I doubt it’ll be out in 2023, either, but perhaps we can dare to hope.

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