Winds of Winter to release on 9 March 2017? Amazon France sparks fans' hopes

Despite strong injunctions from the likes of Nil Gaiman that George RR Martin is not your b**tch, fans of the Song of Ice and Fire books, on which HBO’s fantasy epic Game of Thrones is based, can’t stop speculating about when the sixth installment in the series — The Winds of Winter (TWOW) — is due. [caption id=“attachment_2991432” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  GRR Martin. File photo/Reuters[/caption] A few chapters released on GRRM's blog have assuaged fans’ desperation for the sixth book somewhat, but they had also fanned fears that the writer is stuck, that the material he posted was written at least a couple of years ago, and that the TV show would have finished its run (production on its penultimate seventh season is currently on) long before Martin finished the books. However, hope that Winds of Winter should be in the hands of fans sometime in the near future has been fanned by a placeholder page on Amazon’s France page. And there, along with the price for the book (€ 9,94), the page also provides a release date for the book — 9 March 2017. Now there is no official confirmation that this is indeed when TWOW will release: as winteriscoming.net points out, online bookstores do this frequently for expected released, with a tentative date.This is not an indication that the book will actually be available for purchase on that date.

Amazon’s other country stories — the US, UK, other territories — have not made any similar placeholder pages for the book. Moreover, there has been no announcement on GRRM’s own blog, so as most reports have said, one can’t read too much into the Amazon France TWOW page. For now, it seems like the Winds of Winter will take a while to reach us yet.