The Stone Sky

The Stone Sky is a science fantasy novel by the American writer N. K. Jemisin, published in 2017. It is the third volume of the Broken Earth series and took the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best novel in 2018.

The series is set on the Stillness, a supercontinent whose inhabitants live in city-states called comms and are sorted into castes according to how useful they are to the people above them. Every few hundred years a geological catastrophe is severe enough to start a global volcanic winter, called a Fifth Season, and the people who can move the earth, the orogenes, are both feared for what they can do and relied on for the survival of everyone else.

This volume carries the story to its end game. Essun now holds the power that her old teacher Alabaster carried, and she wants to use it to find her daughter Nassun and to make the world safe for orogene children. Nassun, who has seen more of the world than her mother knows, has reached a different view of what should be done with it.