Truth and clarity shine from these pages, except when darkness falls and even then a sure, strong voice always leads you on, leads you through, leads you up and out.īut will Essun-once Damaya, one Syenite, now avenger-be fooled? Will the request made of her by Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, seal the fate of the Stillness forever, or is something stranger and even more dangerous in the offing?Īnd will her daughter Nassun, coming into her full power as an orogene, ever find her mother? Will either of them discover the secret of why the catastrophic Fifth Seasons periodically savage the Stillness? Jemisin, there is little chance of that for the reader, for you. Here, in the The Obelisk Gate, the Hugo-award winning second volume of The Broken Earth from New York Times bestselling author N.K. Book Two: The Obelisk Gateĭust jacket illustration by Miranda MeeksĪmong the last recorded words of Emperor Mutshatee, before his execution, were these: “Don’t be fooled.” This is the way world the ends… in Jemisin’s unforgettable novel, with tumult, and revelation, and hope. Apocalypses both world-spanning and personal try them, and if there are escapes to be forged, they will not be those a reader expects. The geographies and politics alike are contoured from the stuff of both life and imagination, combining into the rare fantastic setting that is as fascinating as the characters who inhabit it and the stories they find themselves in.ĭeath and betrayal haunt the women who live in these pages. The world of The Fifth Season is the Broken Earth, a world clearly extrapolated from our own, but just as clearly and marvelously an invention of its author.

Their stories are inextricable, yet unique, limned in voices and tones specific and necessary to each character.

Three women in three times-youthful Damaya, skillful Syenite, and the older Essun-each face the challenges of the end times of their world. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, the Hugo Award-winning, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-nominated tour de force of language, incident, and, most of all, of people. Extraordinary worlds, extraordinary endings, witnessed by extraordinary characters.

The broken earth