The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season is a science fantasy novel by the American writer N. K. Jemisin, published in 2015; the Hugo Award for Best Novel went to it in 2016. It opens the Broken Earth series; The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky followed, completing the trilogy. It is set on a world that has one supercontinent, known as the Stillness.

Every few centuries the people of the Stillness live through what they call a Fifth Season, a period of catastrophic climate change, and their civilisation is organised around surviving the next one. The prologue shows an extraordinarily powerful orogene fracturing the continent across its length and threatening the worst Fifth Season on record. The narrative then follows three female orogenes from different parts of the Stillness.

Essun lives quietly in a southern town as an orogene, a person who can move the earth with her mind, until she comes home to find that her son has been murdered and her daughter is gone. Damaya is a child handed over to a Guardian because her family cannot bring themselves to kill her. Syenite is a Fulcrum-trained orogene sent out on a mission with the most powerful orogene alive.

Orogenes are feared, controlled and conscripted, and the season that begins in this book will not end within a lifetime. Jemisin tells the three stories in parallel, with the relationship between them becoming clear as the book proceeds, and the two later volumes continue the same history.