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    The Fifth Season
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    The Fifth Season
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    The Fifth Season
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Fifth Season

    Written by N. K. Jemisin

    Narrated by Robin Miles

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    This is the way the world ends. For the last time.

    A season of endings has begun.

    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.

    A new fantasy trilogy by Hugo, Nebula & World Fantasy Award-nominated author N. K. Jemisin.

    Editor's Note

    Award winner…

    Very few novels have such unique, intricate worlds that transport you to new places of imagination while still commenting so cuttingly on current political issues. A worthy Hugo Award-winner.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateAug 4, 2015
    ISBN9781478900832
    Unavailable
    The Fifth Season
    Author

    N. K. Jemisin

    N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has won the Hugo Award for best novel (The Fifth Season); been shortlisted for the Crawford, Gemmell Morningstar, and Tiptree Awards; and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She also won a Locus Award for Best First Novel (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) as well as multiple Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards. Jemisin's short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex; and podcast markets and print anthologies. Her first six novels, a novella, and a short story collection are available from Orbit Books. Jemisin is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she is a counseling psychologist and educator (specializing in career counseling and student development), a sometime hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. N. K.'s stories include The City Born Great and The Fifth Season.

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    Reviews for The Fifth Season

    4/5

    1,899 ratings143 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is so good. I'll say more later. But so. Good.----------------------Trigger warnings for father figures that harm children.
    • 5/5
      If the book weren’t enough, I’d be intrigued by Jemisin’s unprecedented success. She is the first author ever to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel in science fiction or fantasy three years in a row. She burst on the scene with The Fifth Season in 2015, and followed it up with two terrific sequels.The Fifth Season takes place in the Stillness, a place not Earth, where civilization and empires rise and are perhaps in the process of falling once again. The inner lives of characters carry the narrative (the author is a psychologist by training who used a Kickstarter to raise funds to allow her to write full time!). This is a story of trauma, of betrayal, of internecine politics, and yet description wins over judgments. A villain is perhaps not so easily vilified if understood in her own context. There are great empires, and small constituencies laboring quietly in their own interests. And years of training sometimes equip the disenfranchised with unexpected resources in a grand narrative of power and collapse.
    • 4/5
      It’s taken me a while to compile my thoughts about this book, because they’re complicated. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy was one of my favorite bits of recent fantasy. In that series she perfectly blended the the fun and lightheartedness of Naomi Novik with the rich worldbuilding of Patrick Rothfuss, and somehow fit an unexpected contemplativeness and subtle depth in to that mix. So, I’ve bee really eager to get my hands on The Fifth Season ever since I saw it mentioned on her blog.Jemisin as an author has obviously learned a lot from her previous work, in The Fifth Season she carries a more complex plot with ease, and lets her worldbuilding skills run wild. Even with greater complexity, a richer setting, and darker more affecting conflicts, she manages to keep the addictive and light tone of her earlier books.Where this book really struggled was its characters. I liked the protagonist, and certainly no one could say that this book lacked in character development, but over the course of the novel the protagonist seems to become shallower and shallower, and her relationships with other human beings harder and harder to emphasize with. I found myself excited every time a new side character was introduced, hoping they would prove more interesting.The Fifth Season is very much a first installment in a series, particularly with regards to the plot. The book frustratingly ends without a clear conclusion to any plot major point. This makes for a lackluster ending, but is somewhat made up for by just how much has happened in the story from beginning to end. I haven’t read many fantasy novels that can change direction and twist so many times in such a short space.Overall, while I found the Fifth Season harder to love than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Jemisin has progressed as a writer in some really clear ways, and definitely has me eager to read the next book.
    • 4/5
      Maybe this is earth, but it seems to be a single continent. A time very far from our own. People are mostly regular people, but some have extraordinary powers, and some are not human at all. Lots of remnants of ancient civilizations, long gone. Earth is unstable. Fifth Seasons are when some global catastrophe strikes and kills most people. The story follows three people, possessors of extraordinary powers. Gradually the connections between these people are made clear.There is quite a bit of wandering about the countryside. Conditions generally are not too luxurious. Another global catastrophe has struck, so there are lots of refugees wandering, plus pets gone feral. Hard times get worse.
    • 5/5
      The Fifth Season is one of those books that I could easily give 6 stars to. The author really knows how to tell a story. I am already looking forward to the next book in the series. In my opinion, this is one of those few books that rivals Lord of The Rings. The prose was outstanding. The characters are so well thought out and the plot could not have been better. This is will be a permanent addition to me library.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In this world, the Stillness, there is great concern over earthquakes and the devastation they can bring to the entire world. These events are called a Season. Orogenes have the ability to sense the earth and to cause or still quakes. They are considered very dangerous, and generally treated like witches. At the Fulcrum, Orogenes are trained to use and control their abilities. The Guardians watch over them and basically govern them. This story is about Essun, a woman who keeps her orogeny a secret from her entire village, who comes home from work to find her son dead, obviously at her husband’s hands, for having been an orogene. Her daughter is nowhere to be found. It also about Damaya, a young orogene who is being brought to the Fulcrum for training. And finally, it is about Syenite, an ambitious orogene who is paired with a highly skilled and possibly mad orogene to work an assignment far from the Fulcrum.The story starts with an enormous earthquake that starts what may be the worst Fifth Season in history. We then follow Essun, Damaya, and Syenite at different points of time in the Stillness. Throughout, we discover what really happened, why, and who was involved. We learn so much about these three women and their very different lives as orogenes in the Stillness.This book won a Hugo award and so did both its sequels, making for the first time ever that an author received a Hugo award three years in a row. I finished this book and immediately started the second one in line, The Obelisk Gate. It’s a story that pulls you in quickly and doesn’t let go. I want Essun to find her daughter and to learn more about the travelers she meets along the way. I want to see how people intend to survive this Fifth Season, if they even can. Those who enjoy either dystopian or apocalyptic stories will certainly find this book enjoyable. As a person not generally drawn to those sorts of stories, I can attest that this book certainly has a wider appeal. Give it a try and you’ll be sucked right in.
    • 5/5
      This is the first book in the Broken Earth series. N.K. Jemisin won the 2016 Hugo Award for this novel and so I was keen to read it and see if it was as good as the press indicated it was. I was definitely not disappointed. Wow! What an epic start to a series.This is a story that echoes so much of what we are currently facing with climate change on our own beautiful planet. But Jemison cleverly builds her own planet filled with people of different castes and different abilities. Her three main characters (all women orogenes with terrible powers) are unique and compelling.The best part of this book was the care and depth that went into the planning of it. Jemisin has literally built an entire world and the societies that populate it. But within that world are individuals whose stories are important and real. This is the kind of series that has you reaching for the second book almost before you've finish the first. Fantasy lovers everywhere, I highly recommend this one!
    • 5/5
      A fantastic story of world that goes through regular tectonic disasters focusing on a group of people that have the magical ability to save and destroy the world. Even though they are born to humans, they are seen as less. They have the ability to move earth, which means they have the ability to stop earthquakes or cause them. The book has 3 different POVs that focuses on the atrocities humans and others cause these people out of fear. The story is amazing with a plot that gets better with every page. The worldbuliding is done perfectly with new pieces of information given slowly through the book, but still at the end there is plenty of mystery. The characters are interesting and there is a lot of growth. It started out difficult to read as two POVs are in third person and one POV is in second person.
    • 4/5
      I liked it! Solid fantasy. Interesting magic. Healthy normalized queer. Definitely reading the next and more!
    • 5/5
      Broken Earth is the only kind of fantasy book I like, one that's more mythology than magic. Think Lord of the Rings. This world and its myths have many (obviously purposeful) echoes with our world, but not in a heavy handed way. Her dedication is to those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question. It's a compelling thought and she delivers on it. But she also delivers thoughtful writing about a world where nothing lasts for long, where destruction is certain but the time and method not. That too, has many echoes in our climate today. Lastly, she weaves a tale in which social discrimination and the role of technology are separate but not that much, again an astute echo of today. Very much looking forward to reading the other two books in The Fifth Season.
    • 4/5
      Liked it. Wasn't enthralled by it. The world building was very fun and the characters interesting, but that's certainly not unprecedented in fantasy books. The author's style of writing is often oblique or makes it hard to understand what's happening - not in the macro sense - rather in the conversational details. It often seemed to me the author had a very clear visual sense in her head, but wasn't letting me see the details, or was omitting them, so that I was confused rather than intrigued... Some very interesting twists toward the end.
    • 5/5
      I AM SO MAD AT THIS BOOK FOR ENDING. What am I supposed to do now? I have the next book on hold, but it will be days before it gets to me. Maybe even a week!This is all the things I want in a book. It is fantasy and cataclysm. It does something new with magic and the apocalypse. It is deep and dark and true. It has meaning and excitement. I'm talking jerk up from your perfect comfy reading position because a body must be bolt upright to read something this intense excitement.WTF am I gonna do for a week? Pray to the god of holds on my behalf if you believe in that sort of thing.
    • 4/5
      I tried this in 2016, but could not push past the beginning, so put it aside to read later. In the meantime, NK Jemisin kept racking up awards for this and subsequent books. I've found that sometimes, when an initial attempt at reading has been hard for me, that to switch methods (ie go from hard copy to audio or vice versa makes the book more approachable for me. In this case, it worked, along with the fabulous narration by Robin Miles. Onward to the rest of the series soon.
    • 5/5
      This book is a wonder, not only in and of itself but as a blanket tract of hope: that THIS is what genre can be, THIS is what fantasy can be, THIS is what storytelling can be. It starts slow and small--a woman in village mourning a sudden and violent loss--and then like ripples it spreads and spreads until the whole surface is in motion.

      The characters are about as well-done as possible. You know them. You don't always like them, or understand them, but you know them. What they do, what they don't do--it all makes perfect sense. There's no suspension of belief, no "but why would someone act like that??" Even when irrational or self-destructive, the characters MAKE SENSE. And this is rare.

      It's too difficult to go into plot without spoiling things but it does come together in ways both obvious and ingenious.

      Above and beyond, though, this book has given me something that I find lacking in fantasy: STORIES ABOUT WOMEN. Not a story with women but a story ABOUT women. And women who act like PEOPLE, women who prepare for war as adeptly as they fall in love, women who are fierce and soft, women who are mothers and who aren't mothers and women who don't live and die around a romance plot. There is romance, yes. And the romance is fun and different and not infuriating. But the women are not defined by it. The women live in their own heads. And this is quite an accomplishment (although I know it shouldn't be).

      The book is diverse and difficult and structured with the sort of world-building that made Tolkien influential; there are layers and levels and histories and asides, all the well-rounded necessities that make a world full and real instead of just window dressing. I am so grateful for this book, and for its sequels that I will now devour. THIS is what the genre needs. THIS.
    • 4/5
      Science-fantasy about a planet so tectonically unstable that civilisations collapse regularly from vulcanism, earthquakes and tsunamis. Some on this planet have learned to control seismic movements; they are called Orogenes, They are feared and controlled by the 'Stills' who have the numbers if not the power to overwhelm them. Essun is an Orogene whose child has been killed; she seeks his killer as the world ends again.I enjoyed the gritty texture of the world and the sinister Fulcrum where the Orogenes are trained (and dominated). I wasn't quite sure about the 2nd person narrative.
    • 5/5
      Our story begins with the fall of civilization.

      Our story begins with a woman who has just found her murdered son's body.

      This is a world with a long history of civilizations that fall, when the arrival of a "fifth season," a years-long winter triggered by earthquakes and volcanoes, lasts long enough that larger political systems can't outlast it.

      This is also a world with a body of traditional knowledge, the Stone Lore, that is passed down even through the fall of civilizations and the rise of new ones, because it's about how to survive these unpredictable "fifth seasons.." And it's about the orogenes.

      Essun comes home from teaching at the local creche, and finds the body of her young son, beaten to death. Her husband is gone, and so is their daughter--she assumes their daughter is dead, too, and wants to find her body. She knows why her husband killed them; he realized that their children are orogenes, people able to control the movements of the earth, in a world where quakes and volcanoes cause extinction level events every few hundred years.

      Essun is an orogene, one who fled the Fulcrum and the capital, and hid her ability, telling no one in this small town.

      In alternating sections, we get the stories of Essun, Syen, and Damayo. Syen is an orogene sent out from the Fulcrum to deal with a coral-blocked harbor in an outlying town. Damayo is a young girl who is discovered to be an orogene and is taken by a Guardian to the Fulcrum to be trained to serve the empire.

      Syen is partnered with an older orogene, a ten-ring, senior orogene, a man whom she comes to believe may be crazy. She doesn't know how right she is, and most of all she doesn't know why.

      Damayo meets a girl of the Leader caste, and they find a very, very strange room, which turns out to be unexpectedly dangerous.

      Essun, while tracking her husband, meets a very strange boy, and then an equally strange woman, who wind up traveling with her.

      These three stories interact and overlap in interesting and deeply moving ways.

      This isn't a cheerful book. It starts with the collapse of civilization and doesn't get more cheerful from there. And it's the first of a trilogy. Those are reasons I had chosen not to read it, until it became a Hugo Finalist. Now, though, I'm glad I did. It's an excellent book, thoroughly deserves its nomination, and may well win.

      Highly recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 4/5
      I wanted to like this more than I did. It's slow, little happens, and much of the world building is confused, and I really didn't like deliberately confusing and necessarily complex plot structures, the book would have worked much better with a consistent linear chronology. That said, the character(s) are great, there is some clever invention and the everything else is engaging.The world is confused mix of timelines, there is some electricity, some asphalt roads, canons, but most people live in middle age style agrarian lives, with little metal, obsidian knives, and no technology. It's not clear why Jemsin as intruded the more modern elements, or restricted their uptake. Humans are widespread, but there are two other less well known races - one is some form of gargoyle like stone beings, of unknown origin and motivation, rare but powerful. Any limits to their power are not described. The other, rogga, is somewhat like a hybrid of the two, but again not specified, with a mental ability to manipulate rock. This power is constrained through an admirable adhesion to thermodynamics, requiring both the training and skill of the operator, and sufficient heat sources to provide energy. Much less populous than humans they are feared, but also welcomed as they control and tame the violent tectonics of the world, mitigating the occurrence of the ruinous 'fifth season' of death that frequently destroys civilizations. The world history is littered with such fragments, and eventually enough wisdom has been accumulated to allow and empire to survive several tectonic incidents. We follow one woman rogga through different stages of her life as she is trained, escapes and lives with the consequences of her actions. Meanwhile of course the world continues it's normal course without care that people's lives can be profoundly altered. It's clear that she has some special capacity, and that this is noticed by one of the stone-people. But in this volume there's no explantion of how or why, nor what the stone people want with her. We gain plenty of insight into her motivation, and why she's unhappy with the current social structure, but she takes little action to alter it.I will probably read the rest of the series, but won't be too concerned about tracking them down.
    • 5/5
      Very well built novel on an interesting world. Easy to understand why this series is making such a splash these days. Looking forward to the nest one!
    • 5/5
      Wow! Exhausting adrenaline rush with powerful themes and flawed characters we love or hate.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book in the Broken Earth series. It is also the first book I've read by N. K. Jemisin. I have to say, I really enjoyed the writing. Even the strange point of view of some of the chapters, which I found odd at first, stopped bothering me. Something about her writing style just made me want to keep reading this book. That's a good thing, because the plot didn't. For far too much of this book, not a lot happened. Whether it was traveling or waiting for something, there was way too much waiting for something to happen. It also doesn't help that this is part fantasy, part post-apocalyptic fiction and part scifi (only a little). The characters are interesting, though sometimes a little one-note. All in all, an enjoyable read.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. N.K. Jemison is a marvel. Fantasy had grown a little stale for me as of late but this book is so out of the box and so full of surprises that I could see reading it again someday. I don't think it will read the same way twice. I will take a small break and then dive right into the next book. Easily the best book I have read in the last few years.
    • 5/5
      I've heard so much about this book that I was kinda worried I wouldn't love it as much as I wanted to...but I did.

      The concept of this book is so cool! I also really enjoyed the narrative style, it took a bit getting used to, but I ended up really enjoying it and understanding why it was written that way. I loved how the story wove together and how we got to see the history of the empire and the fifth seasons.

      I really enjoyed the characters in this novel, and how we got to know them. I found that the exposition and character development connections really interesting and I really enjoyed the writing.

      The world was also really cool - I liked how we got to see different parts of the world and how everything connected.

      This novel was just written really well and my incoherent thoughts are not doing it justice.

      GO read it.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this. It took a little while to get into the "language" of this world but I soon settled into it. I didn't spot the "twist" until the author intended me to. I carried straight on to the next book.
    • 4/5
      Oh boy, what a ride! And yet, I'm torn on whether to give this four or five stars. There were parts that annoyed me and there's quite a bit of confusion in parts. Although the ending explains a LOT of what's confusing. I don't want to say too much because even little things can give the ending away. Hmm...I'll have to think on this a bit...but I'm so very glad I picked this book up from the library!
    • 3/5
      I found some aspects of the book to be interesting, but it fell flat for me. The world-building was expansive and rich, weaving the fantasy elements of those able to move stone.I found the three point of view protagonists to be distracting, leaving the world disjointed in a way that made little sense. Some of it is clearly meant to leave parts to be taken up in the additional books in the series. I did not find anything compelling enough to continue with the series.
    • 5/5
      This book deserves every bit of the hype it has gotten and more. Here is a list of the awards and nominations it has received:

      Hugo Award for Best Novel (2016)
      Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (2015)
      Locus Award Nominee for Best Fantasy Novel (2016)
      The Kitschies Nominee for Red Tentacle (Novel) (2015)
      Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fantasy (2015)


      Did you know there was a Red Tentacle award? Me either! But now I need to go find out more about it!

      I was lucky enough to be at the Hugo Awards when this book received Best Novel last year, and it was so exciting! There was so much happiness in the room that N. K. Jemisin had won. It felt like a love wins victory after the weird political divisiveness that has been going on in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy world that is such a mirror of real world politics. I wasn't aware of that until I knew we were going to World Con and had started doing some research and ran into articles discussing the different factions. I would have expected this genre to be the most open minded and accepting of all, considering it is based on magic and imagination and science we haven't achieved yet. But alas it still has some ugliness to work out. I think it's dwindling, but it is still there.

      That cannot dim the greatness that is The Fifth Season. This was such a well crafted and interesting world, story and cast of characters. There are many messages worked in, class systems, prejudice, history being set by the winners, and rewritten to suit the regime, all woven into a story where it fits, it's not forced, it just is part of the world. Which brings up another idea to me, acceptance of what is, because you don't know any different, and the idea that maybe you need to look further than the surface to see what's really going on. The world itself is so intriguing to me, the "powers" that certain people have are geology based, and it is definitely a post apocalyptic world, perhaps many times post apocalypse, as is suggested in the first line of the summary. This has all happened many times before, they have lore which relates instructions on how to survive it, but maybe that won't be enough this time. There are mysterious DeadCiv artifacts from long gone times, and strange floating obelisks that clearly served an important function, which has been lost over time.

      Enjoy isn't the right word for this, I was fascinated and so interested to see where it was going. I'm definitely in for the rest of the ride, and highly recommend it! I wish I had taken notes while I was reading it, there were so many a-ha moments and "I see what you're doing there" that I'm finding difficult to relate now after the fact, universal truths and parallels to our world that make this one changed yet still recognizable to us. Yes, I'm gushing. I'll stop now, you should definitely check out this 5/5 book for yourself!
    • 4/5
      It took me a little bit to get into this book but once I did, I was hooked. The second person narrative threw me off at first - I generally don't like 2nd person stories, but thankfully the majority of the book was third person. I'm not sure quite what to classify this series as. Fantasy? Science Fiction? A little of both? As readers we don't know yet where this is going so I can't say for sure. For now I'm leaving it at fantasy. Whatever it is, I liked it a lot. I liked how the different perspectives connected (something different), and I loved the plot. I'm really interested in getting the next book now.
    • 5/5
      Brutal, intense, and fascinating. I was totally sucked in by the troubled, volcanically unstable world and its palimpsest of forgotten cultures and technologies. The three threads of a story flow together with increasing vehemence. Jemisin has come into her own as a storyteller.
    • 4/5
      I'm still mulling this one over, so my review may reflect that. This is not my "typical" genre, although I do dip into sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian novels now and again, so it's not completely out of my wheelhouse. Basically, all the great reviews made me push this one to the top of my TBR pile.This is a difficult book to review. It's very unique in that the setting is a world similar to ours, but yet not. A world where "seasons" (similar to catastrophic events, or apocalypses) occur every several hundred or thousands of years. A world where geology plays a large part in the scope of life, and where certain people or beings have the power to control the earth and its influence on its people and communities. The chapters alternate between three main characters -- a young girl, a young woman, and an apparent middle-aged woman, all being manipulated in different ways. I'll be honest. It took me quite a while to get into this book. It wasn't until at least the halfway point that I really had a desire to want to keep going to find out how everything was going to fit together. The story is confusing, especially initially, and is even harder to follow with all of the strange character and place names. I read this one on audio, and while it was performed quite competently, I do think I may have gotten more out of the written book, as seeing the names in print may have helped cement them in my mind a little better. Additionally, as other reviewers have mentioned, this is a book that is best read somewhat slowly and carefully, in order to truly digest what's going on. On audio, I sometimes lamented the fact that I couldn't easily flip back & re-read a section to further process it. While I wasn't blown away by this novel as many have been, the more I sit and process, the more I appreciate it. I find myself thinking about it and wondering what's going to happen next. And so, I'll surely continue on to book #2 and #3, although I'll probably forego the audio and read them in print.
    • 4/5
      I try to avoid series but this book kept popping up in my horizon (like an obelisk) until I finally bought it. This is a first book in The Broken Earth Series) and I found it to be entertaining. As a fantasy, there is the world building aspect yet it felt like the same earth that I am familiar with but the people did not seem familiar. These characters were unique, at least to me but I also felt that the author was weaving in the aspect of racism that is quite familiar. Their are 3 women that we follow in the story and because I mostly listened and did some e book I may have missed important shifts in seasons/time so it does seem to jump around a bit. Besides racism, sexual diversity, there is also an ecology aspect to the story as well as a strong female populated book. This is not a black and white, good vs evil fantasy. This is a book of flawed characters and hope through destruction. The status quo is unacceptable. The Fifth Season was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016.