The Stone Sky

The concluding volume of the Broken Earth, and it should not be read first.

Essun has crossed a dying continent looking for her daughter and has become one of the most powerful orogenes alive, able to still an earthquake or freeze a town, at the cost of turning slowly to stone. Nassun, who is ten, has been taken south by the father who murdered her brother, has learned what her mother is, and has concluded that a world which does this to children should be ended rather than repaired. Mother and daughter are moving toward the same place with opposite intentions.

Between them Jemisin finally opens the deep history: what Syl Anagist was, what was done to the people who built the obelisks, and why the moon left. That section, narrated from inside the civilisation that caused everything, is the best writing in the trilogy and reframes the previous two books as the long aftermath of an industrial atrocity.

The second person narration, which has been a puzzle since the first page of the first book, is explained here, and the explanation is worth the wait.

Hoa, the stone eater who has been at the edge of the story since the first page, finally gets to speak in his own right, and what he turns out to have been doing all along is the trilogy's quietest and best idea.

It is around four hundred and fifty pages and it is relentless. Jemisin does not soften the position she set up: a world built on the enslavement of a class of people may not be worth saving, and the book takes that seriously enough to make the alternative frightening.

Expect grief, no reconciliation on comfortable terms, and an ending that is earned rather than happy.

Best for readers who have finished the first two and want to know whether the trilogy sticks the landing. It does, and the deep history section alone justifies the whole sequence.