THE PLOT: ‘The Fifth Season’ by N.K. Jemisin is science-fiction fantasy about the end of the world. In a distant future, Sanze – the world-spanning empire for a thousand years – collapses as a great rift tears the continent in two and sends a huge ash-cloud into the sky. On the same day, Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in an ordinary town, comes home to find her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. He’s learned she’s an orogene; a lower-class caste of demeaned slaves controlled by the ruling Sanze. As society falls apart, Essun must trek through the dying land to get her daughter back.

SUMMARY: This book is incredible. I cried, I laughed, I was so invested. This is a ‘stay-up-all-night-and-read-one-more-chapter’ kind of book. Yes, it’s almost 500-pages and there’s a lot going on. A dystopian society 10,000 years in the future suffers an environmental cataclysm that turns it post-apocalyptic and the story of how this happens is told in three points-of-view. There is so much world-building, you need time to get into the book and must persevere through the first fifty pages. But the payoff is so worth it. Even if you’re not a huge fantasy reader, I beg you read this. You won’t be disappointed.

GOOD BITS: This book ticks so many boxes. There are well-rounded POC characters. There are realistic, non-tokenistic LGBT characters and non-traditional relationships. There’s an overarching theme of slavery and oppression that doesn’t feel laboured or didactic. And it’s all woven together so seamlessly, you feel fully immersed in the story throughout. I guessed the big twist and yet there was still so much to keep me invested. From the well-crafted sentences to the extremely clever structure, this book is a writing masterclass.

NOT SO GOOD BITS: N/A

OVERALL: I’m not a huge SFF reader so I don’t have a ton of comps. But I’d recommend this book to fans of ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler, ‘The Lies of Locke Lamora’ by Scott Lynch, and ‘The Poppy War’ by R.F. Kuang. If you want to completely lose yourself in a book, buy this ASAP.

You can purchase this book with a discount and support @aminasbookshelf via my bookshop.org account.