Game of Thrones

Catelyn Stark's story does not end at the Red Wedding in Martin's novels, and that alone tells a viewer how much the five books hold that the series left out. A Song of Ice and Fire, begun with A Game of Thrones in 1996, is denser, stranger and more tangled than its adaptation. Its storylines were never merged to save screen time. On the page you meet Lady Stoneheart and the grim Brotherhood she leads. You follow Jeyne Poole's ordeal as the false Arya and the real Mance Rayder's gamble to save her. You also watch a Sansa who learns politics in the Vale instead of enduring Winterfell. These are not footnotes. They send the story in directions the show never took. The books also do what television cannot. Each chapter is told from inside one character's head, so the fear, calculation and self-deception that the screen can only suggest are laid bare. Even the opening scene is quieter and more unsettling in its ambiguity. The series is still unfinished, and Martin's own route to the end may differ from the show's. For anyone who felt the final seasons rushed, the books offer the fuller, slower-burning version of the world, with its outcome still open.

The later seasons run past the published books. The showrunners worked from what George R. R. Martin had told them he planned, filling the gaps and working around what they had already put on screen. Because the novels have no ending yet, nobody can say whether the finale matches Martin's. Reported hints suggest book Sansa may still end up as queen in the North, but by a very different route. Within the published books, the show is a loose adaptation. Lady Stoneheart is cut entirely. In the novels, Beric Dondarrion brings Catelyn Stark back to life after the Red Wedding, and she returns as the vengeful leader of the Brotherhood Without Banners. On screen, her story ends in the river. Sansa's later arc is largely reassigned. On the show she marries Ramsay Bolton and suffers his abuse, but in A Dance with Dragons that role belongs to her childhood friend Jeyne Poole, who is passed off as Arya. Book Sansa stays in the Vale with Littlefinger and grows more politically savvy. Her rescue by Brienne, her journey to Jon at Castle Black and its link to Theon's redemption have no equivalent in the books so far. One source also describes book Ramsay as even more terrifying than the show's version. Mance Rayder does not die by Jon's mercy arrow in the novels. The man burned is Rattleshirt in disguise, and the real Mance goes on to try to free Theon and the false Arya from Ramsay. Smaller changes add up. Plotlines from A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons were merged and rearranged inside single episodes. Series consultant Elio Garcia called some of these portrayals vastly different from the originals. Some events also happen in a different order, with Jaime reaching Riverrun before Cersei's walk of atonement in the books but after it on screen. Even the opening scene differs. The book's dead wildlings seem to have frozen in their sleep, far beyond the Wall after days of ranging, while the show's are brutally massacred and arranged near the Wall on the rangers' first day out.