Essun - grief-stricken after her husband suddenly kills their small son and flees with their daughter - begins a quest that starts out as a rescue but becomes something else entirely, as a horrific new cataclysm bears down on the Stillness. The Fifth Season is the first book in Jemisin's latest series, The Broken Earth, and it's already off to an equally promising start. Jemisin has built similarly complex worlds before, most notably in her multiple-award-nominated The Inheritance Trilogy. And Essun is a small-town schoolteacher whose family has been brutally ripped apart from within. In the fractured landscape that houses the sprawling city of Yumenes, that instability has given civilization an equally volatile reality.

The entire world undergoes apocalypses on a periodic basis, as regular as weather patterns. The story takes place in a land called the Stillness, a tragically ironic name, seeing as how the geography is in constant, violent flux. Sure, there's a whopping glossary at the end of the book - two of them, actually - but that simply underscores how much sumptuous detail and dimensionality she's packed into her premise. Jemisin's new novel, The Fifth Season, the payoff is astounding. Positively, fantasy-novel glossaries help the reader keep track of an intricate clockwork of imaginary peoples, places, and things - and that intricacy actually pays off.

Negatively, they're self-indulgent exercises in building fictional worlds, with the author fixating on the sheer quantity of settings and characters to the exclusion of all else. There are two ways to look at the kind of fantasy novels that come with big glossaries at the end. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Fifth Season Author N.

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