For a long time I thought fantasy fiction was the sort of thing I should avoid. I didn’t like Lord of the Rings that much and I found The Hobbit a bit, well, childish. I preferred grittier or loftier things to read. Or so I thought. This week I picked up – metaphorically that is: I actually downloaded – George R. R. Martin’s A Game Of Thrones and it’s proved me wrong. It is packed with the sort of fantasy tropes I thought I’d hate – dragon eggs, dwarves, a mysterious group of creatures called The Others – but I could hardly put it down and have gone out and bought the next in the series.

Why was I so struck? Because of it’s grandeur and ambition I think. The books are about war and fantasy but they are also about politics and ambition. Modern literary fiction and crime fiction don’t really deal with the scope of politics and leadership very well and, all to often, they pay lip service to matters of state so that they fall short and feel false. In part because they are necessarily short these days: big books are harder to sell. George R. R. Martin doesn’t do this. A Game of Thrones is a fascinating examination of why men and women in positions of power act as they do and it shows the consequences of these actions in vivid detail. I can’t wait to keep reading the series and it’s great to be proven wrong too.