The Fifth Season

About The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season is the first epic fantasy novel in N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy, and one of the most formally inventive works in contemporary fantasy. The world of the Stillness is shaped by catastrophic geological events called Fifth Seasons, and its people have developed a brutal caste system to survive them—including the orogenes, people with the power to still earthquakes and move stone, who are enslaved, controlled, and feared. The novel follows three women: Essun, a middle-aged teacher who returns home to find her son murdered and her daughter missing; Damaya, a child orogene newly taken from her family; and Syenite, a trained orogene sent on a mission that will change her understanding of everything she was taught. Jemisin's use of second-person narration for Essun creates an intimacy unlike anything else in the genre, drawing the reader directly into the character's grief and fury. The world-building is staggering in its originality—geological, mythological, and sociological in equal measure. The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first author to win that award three consecutive years for the full trilogy. An absolute landmark of epic fantasy.

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