The Fifth Season
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4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)
This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.
Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The first installment in N. K. Jemisin's chilling Broken Earth trilogy is a richly detailed sci-fi fantasy set on a planet scarred by earthquakes and volcanic eruption. The Fifth Season’s story of impending apocalypse follows the lives of three female orogenes, beings who can shatter mountains or quell quakes with a single thought. Jemisin tells their stories non-chronologically and from shifting perspectives, creating a captivating allegory that explores religion, race, gender, and social class. Those big ideas—and her incredible storytelling—are why she’s the first author ever to win the prestigious Hugo Award three years in a row.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Humans struggle to survive on a ruined world in this elegiac, complex, and intriguing story, the first in the Broken Earth series from acclaimed author Jemisin (the Inheritance Trilogy). The Stillness is a quiet and bitter land, sparsely populated by subsistence communities called comms. Essun lived quietly in a comm with her husband and children until her secret got out: she and her children are orogenes, those who have the ability to control Earth forces. They can quell or start earthquakes, open veins of magma, and generally cause or rein in geological chaos. Authorities keep a brutal hold on orogenes, controlling everything about their lives, including whom they breed with. Those who escape servitude and seek safety in the comms face expulsion and execution at the hands of the fearful. Soon after Essun's secret is revealed, her husband kills their son, and her daughter goes missing. Essun sets off to find the girl, undertaking a journey that will force her to face unfinished business from her own secret past. Jemisin's graceful prose and gritty setting provide the perfect backdrop for this fascinating tale of determined characters fighting to save a doomed world. Readers hungry for the next installment will also find ample satisfaction in rereading this one.
Customer Reviews
Great read, great beginning!
Loved the entire book. Really get into worlds made up in their entirety by the author. So much description, so much love, so much hate, so much adventure!
I will be reading the rest of this series when the rest of her books come out. For the record, I finished this book in one sitting. For me, it was that good. It was the perfect read when the power went out during a tropical storm that hit big island Hawaii.
Definitely getting the rest of the series, definitely !
Distracting Style
Could not get interested due to the weird present tense writing style.
Rock and Roll
A very imaginative book, easy for me to be engrossed in throughout. The story is fascinating and intricate but not unnecessarily difficult to follow. Or frustrating, as when weird things happen for no apparent reason except plot support, a trap fantasy books are susceptible to. I’m not a serious science fantasy book reader but I imagine part of the enthusiasm for this series is its cleverness. Jemisin is also a gifted storyteller. The characters feel authentic and relatable and the nonlinear approach is striking. So is the use of differing authorial voices. My one complaint is some of the links Jemisin clearly wants to make to our current condition can feel contrived and preachy. She’s stretching too much sometimes. But, on the other hand, a lot of readers, including myself, expect and want to see the links between the story we’re reading and our own condition, and while these observations are not the strongest parts of the book, they are serious and thought provoking nonetheless.