If you really want a detailed and entertaining story about Cyrus ' s life and the impact he had after , I ' d suggest the Kings of Kings series from the podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin <| sep |> They ' re much lighter and breezier in tone , but don ' t sacrifice the tone and harsh realities that Martin establishes in the main series . They ' re set in a time of relative peace the first story , The Hedge Knight , is set in 209 , in the final year of the reign of Daeron the Good so you get to see life in the Seven Kingdoms during the Targaryen golden age , rather than under the threat of an apocalyptic war . Martin uses the same tight third person POV structure as in the main series , but the only POV character is Dunk . Dunk is very , very similar to Brienne . Both are unlikely knights trying to do the right thing even though they tend to get in way over their heads and be a little slow on the uptake . Only major difference is Dunk ' s chip on his shoulder comes from being lowborn , whereas Brienne ' s comes from being a woman . His relationship with Egg is a definitely parallel to Brienne ' s relationship with Podrick , although the DE stories have quite a bit more incident than Brienne ' s Feast chapters . I ' d highly recommend them . You can get all three in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , which is probably pretty cheap on Amazon . And all three stories are only about 80100 pages each . You could read the whole thing in a long afternoon .