There is a particular alchemy at work in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms that one does not easily find elsewhere. It is not merely that we are given knights and swords and tournaments — any number of books can furnish those — but that we are given Dunk. A great, lumbering, earnest fellow who is not entirely certain he was ever knighted at all, yet who stumbles headlong into honor as though he cannot help himself. And beside him, young Egg, half nuisance and half conscience, whose sharp tongue and quiet loyalty make him one of the most endearing companions in all of Martin’s work.
If you have turned the final page of those tales and found yourself wanting more — more wandering knights with muddy boots, more chivalric codes tested against the ugliness of the actual world, more stories where the person beneath the armor matters infinitely more than the armor itself — then we have been searching on your behalf, and we believe we have found what you are after.
These are the finest character-driven novels about knights and chivalry we know, each one chosen because it shares that essential quality with Martin’s books: the understanding that a story about a knight is, at its best, a story about a person trying to be good in a world that makes goodness extraordinarily difficult.
1. Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
It is the year 1348, and France is dying. The plague has hollowed out the countryside, and into this landscape of ash and despair wanders Thomas, a knight stripped of his title and his honor, who has turned to banditry simply to survive. When he encounters a young woman named Delphine who insists she must reach Avignon to confront a gathering evil, Thomas finds himself doing what he had sworn never to do again — protecting someone.
The journey that follows is harrowing, luminous, and profoundly strange, for the horrors that stalk them are not merely human. Buehlman writes a redemption story in which the act of becoming a knight again is indistinguishable from the act of becoming a decent person again, and the bond between Thomas and Delphine will remind you of nothing so much as Dunk and Egg at their most quietly magnificent. If you read one book from this list, we would press this one into your hands first.
2. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
Cazaril arrives at court like a man who has been wrung out and hung to dry. Once a courtier of standing, he returns from slavery and shipwreck as a humble tutor to a young princess, wanting nothing more than a quiet life. The court, naturally, has other plans.
What makes Bujold’s novel so perfectly suited to admirers of Dunk is that Cazaril, like Dunk, is a man of dogged, unglamorous virtue. He is not the strongest swordsman or the cleverest schemer. He is simply a person who, when faced with an impossible moral choice, will choose the right thing and accept whatever it costs him. The fantasy here is quiet and theological — there are gods, and they take an interest, but they cannot intervene without a willing vessel — and the result is one of the most intelligent and deeply felt explorations of honor in all of fantasy literature.
3. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
We would be poor guides indeed if we did not include the book that taught the modern world what chivalry means. White’s retelling of the Arthurian legend begins in playful enchantment — young Wart is tutored by the eccentric Merlyn, who teaches through transformation and gentle mischief — and grows steadily into something magnificent and tragic. Arthur’s great idea, that Might should be used only in service of Right, becomes the organizing principle of a civilization, and the Round Table stands as its embodiment.
But the idea is tested, relentlessly, by love and betrayal and the stubborn imperfections of the human heart. This is the definitive literary exploration of what chivalry aspires to be and why it so often fails, told with warmth and wit and a sorrow that creeps in so gradually you hardly notice until it has you entirely.
4. The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay sets his tale in a world drawn unmistakably from medieval Spain, where three faiths share an uneasy peace that is swiftly unraveling. At its center stands Rodrigo Belmonte, a cavalry captain of such legendary prowess and quiet, stubborn honor that one cannot help recognizing the spirit of El Cid. His unlikely counterpart is Ammar ibn Khairan, a poet and warrior of equal gifts and opposite allegiance, and between them moves Jehane bet Ishak, a physician whose fierce moral clarity anchors the story’s heart.
Kay does something extraordinarily painful and extraordinarily beautiful here: he makes you love all three of these people, makes you understand how they love and respect each other, and then places them in a world where loyalty to their own people may cost them everything they share. The knightly virtues on display — courage, devotion, the willingness to lay down one’s life for what one holds sacred — are rendered all the more powerful because they are tested not by simple villainy but by the impossible demands of a fragmenting world. This is character-driven fiction of the highest order.
5. The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron
William Gold enters the story with his head full of chivalric romances and his pockets entirely empty. His family has fallen, he has been branded a thief, and his first suit of armor is scavenged from corpses after the Battle of Poitiers. This is the Hundred Years’ War as it actually was — lawless, desperate, and cruel — and Gold must navigate it as a mercenary among killers and spies, slowly discovering that the chivalric ideals he admired as a youth might be the only thing worth holding onto.
Cameron is himself a historical reenactor who fights in real medieval tournaments in full armor, and the authenticity here is staggering, from the weight of a mailed glove to the economics of feeding a company of soldiers. Like Dunk, Gold is an “ill-made” knight who must earn every scrap of honor through stubborn moral effort rather than noble birth.
6. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron
A young mercenary captain known only as the Red Knight accepts a contract to defend an Abbess and her fortress from the encroaching Wild — a vast, magical force that proves far more dangerous and organized than anyone expected.
Cameron — the same author as Christian Cameron above, writing here under a pen name — holds a degree in medieval history and fights in real armored tournaments, and the combat here, as in his work above, has a physical authenticity that is equally notable. You can feel the weight of the armor, the geometry of the charge, the desperate calculations of a siege.
But what elevates the book beyond spectacle is the Red Knight himself — a man whose past is at war with the code he has chosen to live by, and whose every act of honor carries a weight the world cannot see. The supporting cast is enormous, richly drawn, and given real interiority, in a manner that recalls the sprawling human tapestry of Westeros.
7. The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter by Elizabeth Moon
Paksenarrion — Paks, to her friends, and you will want to be her friend — is a tall, strong farmer’s daughter who runs away from an arranged marriage to join a mercenary company. What follows is not a glorious ascent but a slow, grinding education in the realities of military life: drills, chores, obedience, blisters, and the occasional terrifying engagement.
Moon, a former Marine, writes soldiering with absolute authenticity, and Paks earns every promotion through discipline and moral courage. The full trilogy — The Deed of Paksenarrion — follows her journey from raw recruit into something extraordinary, and Moon earns every step of that transformation with patience and conviction. If you loved Dunk because he was a commoner who embodied knightly virtue more truly than any lord, Paks is his spiritual sister.
8. The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell
Cornwell strips the Arthurian legend down to its bones and rebuilds it in mud and blood. Narrated by Derfel Cadarn, a Saxon-born warrior raised among Britons who becomes one of Arthur’s most trusted warlords, this trilogy — beginning with The Winter King — reimagines Arthur not as a mythic king but as a capable, charismatic leader trying to unite fractious British kingdoms against the Saxon invasion in a post-Roman Dark Age.
The magic is muted, presented largely as superstition and shrewd psychology, and the battles are visceral, precise, and terrifying. Arthur’s idealism — his belief in justice and unity — is constantly tested by political treachery, religious conflict, and his own disastrous personal choices. This is arguably the most historically grounded version of the Arthurian legend ever written, and its Arthur, like Dunk, is a man whose greatness lies not in supernatural gifts but in a stubborn, sometimes foolish determination to be better than the world expects.
9. Lancelot by Giles Kristian
Where Cornwell gives us Arthur through a follower’s eyes, Kristian gives us the most famous knight of all through his own. Set in the same 5th-century Britain — besieged by Saxons, Picts, and Irish raiders — this novel tells Lancelot’s story in his own voice, from a childhood of exile and loss, through his dazzled devotion to Arthur and his wild bond with Guinevere, to the impossible conflict that will define his legend.
Kristian makes Lancelot utterly, painfully human. He is simultaneously the greatest knight who ever lived and a man tormented by the knowledge that his deepest love is a betrayal of everything he holds sacred. The prose is direct and lyrical by turns, the battle scenes ferocious, and the emotional landscape devastating. If you want to understand what it feels like inside the armor — not just the weight of the steel but the weight of impossible choices — this is the book.
10. The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
Grossman — yes, the author of The Magicians — turns his considerable literary gifts upon the Matter of Britain itself, and the result is an Arthurian novel unlike any other. A young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot expecting to pledge himself to the Round Table, only to discover that Arthur is dead. What remains is a band of misfit knights drawn from the margins of legend — Sir Palomides the Saracen, Sir Dagonet the fool, and others whom history and myth have largely forgotten. Together, they set out to do what knights do: quest, fight, protect, and attempt to rebuild something worth believing in.
Grossman gives each of these figures a rich inner life, exploring what it means to inherit a chivalric tradition when the golden age that inspired it has already passed. The prose is intelligent, the battles vivid, the emotional stakes quietly devastating. If A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms asks what chivalry looks like from the bottom up, The Bright Sword asks what it looks like after the fall — and whether it can still matter.
11. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
We include this not merely out of respect for its antiquity — though it was published in 1819 and is, in many ways, often considered a classic amongst tales of medieval knights — but because it remains a genuinely thrilling read. Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon knight disowned by his father, returns from the Crusades to an England torn between Saxon and Norman factions. He enters a tournament in disguise as the “Disinherited Knight,” crosses paths with the disguised King Richard and with Robin Hood, and finds himself caught between love, loyalty, and the sinister schemes of the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert.
Ivanhoe is a notably human hero — capable but not invincible, noble but fallible — and the novel surrounding him is a grand entertainment with tournaments, sieges, and the eternal question of what honor truly demands when the world offers only imperfect choices.
12. Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien de Castell
Falcio val Mond was the First Cantor of the Greatcoats — an order of traveling magistrates and master duelists who roamed the land dispensing the King’s justice with nothing more than a rapier, a long coat, and an incorruptible sense of honor. Then the King was murdered, the order disbanded and disgraced, and the Greatcoats became “Tattercloaks” — vagabonds mocked by the very people they once protected. Falcio, along with his companions Kest and Brasti, clings to his oath with the tenacity of a man who knows that if he lets go, nothing he has ever done will have meant anything.
De Castell writes with infectious, swashbuckling energy — the swordplay crackles, the banter is superb — but beneath the adventure beats a heart that is entirely serious about the cost of keeping faith with an ideal the world has declared dead. If you have ever loved a knight precisely because the world had turned against him, because his code was all he had left and he refused to surrender it, then Falcio is your man, and this book is your reward.
13. The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan
Here is a knight who carries not a sword but a gavel — or rather, he carries both, and the tension between them is the engine of the story. Sir Konrad Vonvalt is an Emperor’s Justice, a traveling magistrate who rides circuit through the provinces of a crumbling empire, empowered to compel truth, pass judgment, and execute sentence. Narrated by his young clerk Helena, the novel follows Vonvalt as a provincial murder investigation unravels into a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of power.
Swan’s world is medieval, richly drawn, and full of the small, telling details that make a setting breathe — the mud of the road, the politics of a tavern, the weight of a seal. Vonvalt himself is a fascinating study in what happens when a man who has devoted his life to an ideal of justice discovers that the institution he serves may no longer deserve his devotion. It is a fresh and deeply compelling take on the question that haunts every knight in every story on this list: what do you do when your code and your world are no longer compatible?
Each of these books understands something that Martin understood when he wrote the tales of Dunk and Egg: that the most interesting thing about a knight is never the armor. It is the person who chose to put it on, and the reasons they keep wearing it even when the world gives them every excuse to take it off. We hope you find your next great read among them.
