The Obelisk Gate

The Obelisk Gate is a science fantasy novel by the American writer N. K. Jemisin, published in 2016. It is the second volume of the Broken Earth series, following The Fifth Season and preceding The Stone Sky, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel as its predecessor had done.

The series takes place on the Stillness, a single supercontinent where a severe climate event arrives every few hundred years. This book picks up after an especially bad one, a season that may become an apocalypse, and follows two characters who were separated just before it began: Essun, a powerful orogene driven out of her home, and Nassun, her ten-year-old daughter, who is an orogene too.

Orogenes can move the earth, and are feared and controlled for it. Essun has found shelter but not her daughter, and the man she meets there, Alabaster Tenring, has a request that would decide what happens to the Stillness. Mother and daughter are both travelling and both learning what their power is for, and Jemisin tells most of the story from their two points of view.