The Fifth Season: The Broken Earth, Book 1

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 38,676 ratings

Price: 21.83

Last update: 02-13-2025


About this item

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.

Listen to the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT best-selling author N. K. Jemisin.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Constant Reader
    5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Complex, Engrossing, Well-written
    Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2019
    You do not need a reader’s review to tell you that this book (the first in the Broken Earth trilogy) is remarkable. Three Hugo Awards should be enough. But awards are from industry experts. Here is why I think this very well-written book is remarkable, and why I enjoyed reading it. My first consideration is always for the story. Does the plot catch my interest? Does the pacing work to keep me turning pages? Absolutely! (It was late last night when I finally closed my Kindle.) This story is very intriguing. Different voices tell the story as it shifts. You do not know exactly what the shifts are, but you don’t care because there is so much to figure out. It is not confusing, as you are reading. The world building in this book is complex and richly detailed This is a world of successive natural disasters over the ages, most of which have been geological in origin. It is not a happy place or an easy life. Survival is going to be a struggle for everyone in the years to come after the latest disaster. There are multiple races, languages, and types of beings. The story is focused largely on orogenes who are born with a talent to control the earth. It is complicated and powerful magic, so any summary is inadequate. The orogenes are both needed and feared so the society has created a Guardian hierarchy to control, train, and identify these people. My second consideration is for the characters. Are these people that I can believe and care about? The story opens with a mother grieving over the body of her murdered child. I definitely cared about her character and her journey to search for the murderer and her surviving child. There are many twists and complications throughout the book, including some very fundamental aspects that are only revealed later. It feels like brilliant plotting and structuring, not like a cheap trick. If you are considering this book for a younger reader or if you prefer to stick to books that would be rated PG at the movies, there are some things that you might want to know. The book is complex. In addition, there is violence, significant threat, dispassionate sex that is ordered for procreation (in essence breeding of people), passionate sex (including same sex partners and three-way sex), rough language, and child abuse and mistreatment. All of these elements are integral to the story that is being told, but they could be disturbing to a sensitive reader. In fact, some elements, such as the child abuse and mistreatment should be disturbing to all of the readers and it helps to define essential parts of the society and to drive the plot.
  • The book guy
    4.0 out of 5 stars Really good book, run don't walk to read this
    Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2016
    There are moments when you pick up a book and you’re immediately captured, in awe with the world building, engrossed by the story and the characters and unable to imagine how you ever lived without ever getting to know the characters before you on the printed page. I call that moment ‘the click’, that magical moment when the story comes together and you are at the authors beck and call, devouring every word on the page like some thirsty traveler in the desert devouring water from a refreshing stream. Before penning this review, I wasn’t sure what to really say about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, that has not already been said before. I mean Jemisin is already recognized as one of the rising stars in the Fantasy genre, infusing diversity and innovation in her work, turning the norms of the franchise on their head with every book. And this was before she won the Hugo. If only we all could be so lucky.

    That being said, I’ll try and I'll start by saying I thoroughly enjoyed The Fifth Season. I mean who wouldn’t like a novel who’s novel begins with the sentence, “Lets start with the end of the World”, a sentence that immediately had me hooked. End of the world, you can’t start with stakes higher than that for crying out loud. That being said, welcome to the Land known as the Stillness, a world that is anything but. You see this world is marked by seasons, cataclysmic geological events where the Earth in its anger tries to wipe out all human life on the planet for some unknown transgression. The magic of this world is also tied heavily to the Earth as well, orogeny it’s called, the ability of certain people orogenes to sense and manipulate tectonic activity, drawing their power from their environment to quiet quakes and manipulating other geological events such as closing volcanoes, clearing reefs etc. Naturally one would thing that such beings of power in a world of geological uncertainty would be worshiped our even revered but NK Jemisin flips this idea on its head and places orogenes in a position of discrimination and oppression. These individuals are feared for their abilities, labeled as a curse on the planet by Father Earth, slaughtered for their powers. Think more X-men rather than say Avengers, feared rather than loved for their powers. As such Orogenes are rounded up and taken to a school known as the Fulcrum where they can learn to use their abilities, ostensibly for their own protection but primarily so they can be controlled and used as weapons for the Totalitarian state that governs the majority of the Stillness. Orogenes are considered less than human feared and mistreated as such, while also policed by the mysterious Guardians who have the amazing ability to negate their powers.

    The beauty of this story lies not only in the characters N.K. Jemisin creates but the themes she intricately weaves throughout the story. True this is a story about life on a hellish world with seasonal apocalypses, but it is also a deeply personal story, a story about family, the nature of both love and identity in the shadow of racial and cultural oppression. The idea of history itself being used as a weapon against the oppressed, a tool to justify the rightness of those in power is explored in the novel, juxtaposed against the idea that the truth if only known would set the world free, if only it were known. There is a strong undercurrent in the novel that Orogeny and orogenes in particular, if they were just allowed to live their lives, love whom they will and take a more active and dynamic role in society that all of humanity would be better off and perhaps even find a way to thrive on this planet who’s desperately trying to kill everyone. It is instead racial discrimination, fear of the other and human nature that keeps this from happening. I ’m not sure a better allegory could be written for our deeply troubled times where isms of all kind divide us in the real world.

    Likewise, the story is told through three different narratives which is normal for a fantasy work, but all three narratives come together beautifully. I won’t ruin it for you, but when these narratives come together its magical. One of the narratives is also written in 2nd person POV which was a wonderful surprise and Jemisin pulls it off beautifully. For years to come, her use of 2nd person will be a wonderful example of how to work with this tough, seldom used perspective. That she pulled this off speaks volumes of Jemisin’s talent, pulling this experimental POV off, yet still telling her story, melding seemingly disparate perspectives from the narratives together without a hitch. Bravo.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the beauty of Jemisin’s prose and style, conversational, taut yet full of purpose with each word. Jemisin’s prose is loaded with meaning, showing rather than telling, the characters interacting and taking cues from each other in the way one would in everyday life. In other words, not everything is spelled out to the reader, you like the character have to read between the lines to catch everything that’s implied on the page. Some may find this annoying, but I found the lack of handholding in some parts to be the true mark of the mature author, trusting their audience while also adding to the wonder of the world she’s created.

    In short, I loved The Fifth Season. It’s a fantasy novel that destroys common fantasy tropes but still tells a story that is rich, deep and more importantly feels like it has something to say. The book won the Hugo, so I’m not sure what more needs to be said to convince you that this is one you need to read. Run don’t walk to this book.

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