Three women in three times—youthful Damaya, skillful Syenite, and the older Essun—each face the challenges of the end times of their world. Their stories are inextricable, yet unique, limned in voices and tones specific and necessary to each character.

The world of The Fifth Season is the Broken Earth, a world extrapolated from our own, but just as clearly an invention of its author. The geographies and politics alike are contoured from the stuff of both life and imagination, combining into the fantastic setting that the characters inhabit and the stories they find themselves in.

Death and betrayal haunt the women who live in these pages. Apocalypses both world-spanning and personal try them, and if there are escapes to be forged, they will not be those a reader expects.

This is the way world the ends… in Jemisin’s novel, with tumult, and revelation, and hope.