The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season is N. K. Jemisin's 2015 fantasy novel, the Hugo Best Novel winner (the first of three consecutive Hugo wins Jemisin would take for the Broken Earth trilogy) and the most important secondary-world fantasy of the 2010s. The setting is the Stillness, a continent shaken by catastrophic seismic events called Fifth Seasons every few centuries. Orogenes are humans who can control these seismic events; the imperial society of the Sanze keeps them enslaved, registered, and used as tools. Three women's stories braid together across the novel: Damaya, a child orogene being taken to the imperial training school; Syenite, a young orogene assigned to her first mission; and Essun, a middle-aged woman whose husband has just murdered their son for showing orogene abilities.

Jemisin's prose innovation is the second-person Essun chapters: the novel addresses Essun as "you" throughout her sections, a choice that turns out by the end of the novel to be the structural key to everything. The braided structure (Damaya, Syenite, Essun) resolves into a single story across 468 pages in a way the reader does not see coming until Jemisin reveals it. The orogeny magic system is hard-rule speculative biology in the best Sanderson tradition but in a register Sanderson would not attempt. The political stakes are higher than most secondary-world fantasy attempts, and the moral architecture is honest about who pays the costs of empire.

Recommended as required contemporary fantasy reading, as the right entry into Jemisin's catalog, and as one of the canonical fantasy debuts of the twenty-first century. Read The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky next; the trilogy resolves into one of the most ambitious completed series in modern fantasy. Five stars without reservation. The Robin Miles audiobook is one of the strongest contemporary audiobook productions.