Published by Orbit, 2015, 468 pages.

“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say ‘the world has ended,’ it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.
“But this is the way the world ends.”

The world is not the one we are familiar with. The continents have merged into a vast land mass called The Stillness. The name is ironic, because the land moves all the time. It is run by the Sanze, a tribe that has taken over—and like all victors, has rewritten history. Then there are the Orogenes (who are the centre of this story), people with special powers. They can draw on the earth’s energy to control natural disasters but because they can also call upon this power when they feel intense emotion, they are seen as dangerous. The Sanze deal with this by taking Orogene children to the Fulcrum where they are trained to control their powers by mentors known as Guardians.

Time is divided into seasons. A season happens every few centuries, and a new one is starting. This one—the fifth—is a huge climate change event. A powerful Orogene has caused the continent to fracture, and the impact is being felt throughout.

There are three threads to this story, all of them centred around an Orogene. Essun has been living in a town called Tirimo, where almost no one knows she is really an Orogene. But her son has inherited her powers and when her husband finds out, he kills the boy in a fit of rage and leaves with their daughter. Essun sets out after them, determined to rescue her daughter.

Damaya is a feral, an Orogene born to normal parents. After an incident at school where she almost causes the death of a boy, her parents lock her in a barn and call a Guardian to deal with her, assuming he will kill her. But he has no intention of killing her: instead, he is taking her to the capital Yumenes, to the Fulcrum, where she will be trained.

Syenite, an Orogene who has been trained at the Fulcrum, has been sent to Allia, a coastal town, with Alabaster, a 10-ringer (in the Fulcrum, ranks in the Orogene are determined by the number of rings—10 rings is the highest). Syenite and Alabaster have to deal with a large reef blocking the harbour. Their job is to move the reef but Syenite discovers that there is an obelisk lying in the water on its side and pulls it out. This was not what they were supposed to do, and the Guardians are not happy. They come after the couple, who flee.

N. K. Jemisin plunges you into her world without much preamble, and I found myself trying to understand this strange landscape and its people. (There is an appendix at the back, but I didn’t find that until the end.) Because of that, the book took me a while to get into. But the story she tells is so compelling—and I did figure out the unfamiliar bits as I went along—that it doesn’t matter.

Like good sci-fi, The Fifth Season is set in another time but tells us something about our own. This is a story about oppression, discrimination, strength and identity: for example, the fact that Essun and Damaya have to hide their powers to be accepted by so-called normal people.

It is also about climate change: in the book, Father Earth is wreaking vengeance for the damage caused to him by humans.

What I loved about the book was the way Jemisin uses timelines. The three threads come together in the end, and it all fits. The characters are engaging and you care about them. The book is beautifully written, and there are passages that feel like they should be read aloud.

Jemisin is a brilliant science fiction writer; she is a Black woman, which makes her unusual in this genre. This is the first of the Broken Earth trilogy.