The Fifth Season

The world is called the Stillness, which is a joke, because the continent is tectonically murderous and civilisation is organised entirely around surviving the next Fifth Season, the years or centuries of ash winter that follow a large enough eruption.

Some people, orogenes, can quiet the earth with their minds. They are essential, feared, and enslaved: taken as children, trained at the Fulcrum under the control of Guardians who can kill them with a touch, and used as infrastructure. Ordinary people lynch them in villages when they surface untrained.

Three women carry the book. Damaya is a child given up to a Guardian by her parents. Syenite is a Fulcrum orogene sent on a breeding assignment with a man she despises. And Essun, in the present, comes home to find her toddler beaten to death by her husband and her daughter gone, on the day a rift opens across the continent and ends the world.

How the three are related is the novel's central move and it is beautifully done.

Alabaster, the most powerful orogene alive and the man who cracked the continent open on the first page, is the best character in the trilogy: brilliant, cruel, exhausted, and entirely correct about what has been done to him.

Essun's chapters are in second person, which sounds like a gimmick and is not, and the reason for it is withheld until the third book.

Jemisin also builds the world through appendices, geological jargon and stonelore, the survival proverbs everyone quotes, so the reading experience is one of assembling a place from fragments rather than being toured through it.

This is a book about people treated as infrastructure, told with real anger, and it is bleak from page one. Around five hundred pages, propulsive once the structure clicks. Best for readers who want fantasy that is about oppression rather than decorated with it.