The Obelisk Gate
by N. K. Jemisin
Summary
Start with the warning that matters most: this is the second book of a trilogy and it makes no concessions to anyone who has not read the first. Read The Fifth Season before this, and the difficulty everyone mentions about the opening of that book resolves itself once you understand what it is doing.
The world is the Stillness, a continent that periodically tries to kill everyone living on it. A fifth season is an extinction level event of earthquake, ash and poisoned air that can last for centuries, and the civilisation on top has organised itself entirely around surviving them. Orogenes are people who can sense and control seismic energy, which makes them essential and makes them hated, and the arrangements the Stillness has built for controlling them are the argument of the trilogy.
Essun, middle aged and repeatedly bereaved, has found a kind of shelter. Her daughter Nassun, elsewhere and out of reach, is becoming more powerful than her mother and is being taught by someone with his own intentions. The book alternates between them as they move toward each other.
Jemisin writes Essun in the second person, which sounds like a stunt and turns out to be doing precise emotional work. The pacing is more deliberate than the first book, because this is the middle volume and its job is to load the gun. If you liked The Fifth Season you will want this immediately and should simply keep going. If you have not read it, start there and come back.
Historical Context & Significance
The Obelisk Gate won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017, N. K. Jemisin's second in consecutive years, and no author had taken back to back Best Novel Hugos in twenty five years.
She then did it again. The Stone Sky won in 2018, making the Broken Earth the only trilogy in which every volume took the genre's most prominent prize and making Jemisin the first author to win Best Novel three years running. She was also the first Black writer to win the award at all, which arrived after several years in which the Hugo electorate had been the site of an organised and very public argument about who science fiction was for.
The trilogy has since become a fixture on university syllabuses and was optioned for screen adaptation, and it substantially reset expectations for what epic fantasy could be about.