The Fifth Season
CBC Books | CBC News | Posted: April 3, 2017 7:01 PM | Last Updated: April 4, 2017
N.K. Jemisin
A season of endings has begun. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter.
It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. (From Orbit)
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Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, better known as N. K. Jemisin. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression.
Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim.
From the book
First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche's broken little body with a blanket — except his face, because he is afraid of the dark — and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She's old hat at this by now.
What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.
And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost-question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:
He wasn't. Not really. But now he will be.
From The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin ©2015. Published by Orbit.