Is there an audiobook of The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1)?

Yes. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Robin Miles.

Is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 19, 2026.

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) by N. K. Jemisin book cover for the Book of the Day science fiction book review

Our score

4.6/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDAugust 2015

Genres

Fiction Science Fiction Fantasy

Themes

Power, control, and who gets to wield it safelyEnvironmental catastrophe reshaping an entire civilizationOppression and the machinery built to enforce itMotherhood and loss under impossible pressure

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1)

Name: The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1)
Price: 11.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin builds a continent that punishes its own people with earthquakes and ash winters, then hands the power to stop them to a caste of orogenes everyone else fears and controls.

The Review

Our take

You read the first fifty pages of The Fifth Season slightly confused about who you're following and why the timeline keeps sliding, and then something clicks and you realize Jemisin has been building three different women's stories toward the same terrible hinge point the whole time. That structural gamble is the first thing worth knowing about this book. It asks you to hold three threads without a map, and it pays that trust off so completely that going back to reread the opening chapter afterward feels like watching a magic trick a second time, once you know where the coin went.

The world itself is the real achievement. The Stillness is a continent that tries to kill everyone on it on a rolling basis, ash and cold and famine cycling through in Seasons that can last years, and Jemisin never treats that as backdrop. It shapes law, religion, childrearing, everything, because a society that has to plan for the next apocalypse organizes itself completely differently than one that doesn't. Into that, she drops the orogenes, people who can pull energy out of the earth itself to stop a quake or, just as easily, to level a city, and the book is honest about how a power like that gets treated: not with wonder, but with chains, training camps, and a bureaucracy built to control it before it controls you. Watching one character learn to throttle her own strength down to something survivable, in real time, on the page, is more unsettling than any battle scene could be.

This is not a comfortable book, and it shouldn't be. Jemisin writes cruelty toward children with a directness that a couple of the source threads found genuinely hard to sit with, and she's right to, because softening it would let the reader off the hook the world itself never does. The prose in the second-person sections does something few fantasy novels attempt, putting you inside a specific body carrying specific grief, and it's a risk that could easily have curdled into gimmick. It doesn't. It just makes the distance between you and Essun collapse faster than a more conventional close-third ever could.

Why you should read

Readers who want worldbuilding with real institutional weight behind it
Fans of morally complicated magic systems tied to real cost
Anyone who likes puzzle-box structure that rewards patience
Readers open to bleak, unflinching fantasy

What to expect

Three interwoven timelines that take a while to connect
A second-person narrative thread alongside more conventional ones
Frank depiction of child abuse and institutional cruelty
Dense, immersive worldbuilding delivered through lived detail, not lecture

By the time the three threads start rhyming with each other, you're not reading for the twist so much as for the shape of the thing, how a world this vast can fold back into one woman's very small, very specific loss. I closed it already reaching for the second book.

Reviewed by Rowan · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.6/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Included with Kindle Unlimited Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1)?: Yes. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Robin Miles.
Listen to The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
Is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) on Kindle Unlimited?: Yes. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 19, 2026.

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Common questions

What is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) about?: You read the first fifty pages of The Fifth Season slightly confused about who you're following and why the timeline keeps sliding, and then something clicks and you realize Jemisin has been building three different women's stories toward the same terrible hinge point the whole time. That…
Is The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) worth reading?: We scored The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) 4.6 out of 5. N. K. Jemisin builds a continent that punishes its own people with earthquakes and ash winters, then hands the power to stop them to a caste of orogenes everyone else fears and controls.