Book One: The Fifth Season

Extraordinary worlds, extraordinary endings, witnessed by extraordinary characters. This is N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, the Hugo Award-winning, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-nominated tour de force of language, incident, and, most of all, of people. 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 clearly extrapolated from our own, but just as clearly and marvelously an invention of its author. The geographies and politics alike are contoured from the stuff of both life and imagination, combining into the rare fantastic setting that is as fascinating as the characters who inhabit it 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 unforgettable novel, with tumult, and revelation, and hope.

Book Two: The Obelisk Gate

Dust jacket illustration by Miranda Meeks

Among the last recorded words of Emperor Mutshatee, before his execution, were these: “Don’t be fooled.”

Here, in the The Obelisk Gate, the Hugo-award winning second volume of The Broken Earth from New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin, there is little chance of that for the reader, for you. Truth and clarity shine from these pages, except when darkness falls and even then a sure, strong voice always leads you on, leads you through, leads you up and out.

But will Essun—once Damaya, one Syenite, now avenger—be fooled? Will the request made of her by Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, seal the fate of the Stillness forever, or is something stranger and even more dangerous in the offing?

And will her daughter Nassun, coming into her full power as an orogene, ever find her mother? Will either of them discover the secret of why the catastrophic Fifth Seasons periodically savage the Stillness?

In this story of their separate journeys to find one another and to uncover the truth of their world’s terrible, cyclic wracking, Essun and Nassun face even greater challenges than they did in The Fifth Season. Greater mysteries, too, with answers offered from strange sources that compel and tantalize, if they can be trusted. If those offering the answers are not trying to play you the fool.

Book Three: The Stone Sky

This is the story of two celestial bodies, the Earth and the Moon, their orbits closing towards catastrophe and devastation. This is the story of two women, a mother and a daughter, their paths destined to cross in tumult and tragedy. This is The Stone Sky, the Nebula-award-winning and Hugo-nominated third volume of The Broken Earth series from New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin.

Essun awakens, possessed of the power of Alabaster Tenring, and learns that the Moon is approaching, bringing with it a tenuous opportunity to end the Fifth Seasons forever. But her daughter Nassun, possessed of a fratricide’s guilt, has her own plans for the great stone in the sky. The decisions and actions of these women have already wrought and wracked the world, but now one of them may change it permanently. And the other may end it.

Perilous journeys, heartbreaking endings, and extraordinary revelations about everything from the nature of magic to the nature of humanity speed this eloquent tale, a tale long in the making, exquisite in the telling, and generous in the sharing.

Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies, bound in cloth and sold out pre-publication 

Lettered  52 signed leatherbound copies, housed in a custom traycase,

How Long Til Black Future Month

Dust jacket and full-color interior illustrations by Paul Lewin.

The Subterranean edition of How Long ‘Til Black Future Month will be oversized, printed in two colors on 80# Finch, with a full-color dust jacket and four full-color interior plates by Paul Lewin.

They had some customers express concern that they were establishing a new, much higher price point for Nora's books with this collection. How Long 'Til Black Future Month? is an outlier. You can expect The Inheritance Trilogy to be priced much more closely to The Broken Earth Trilogy.

About the Book:

This first collection by multiple award-winning novelist N. K. Jemisin demonstrates the enormous reach of her shorter work, which is galaxy-wide and eons-deep. Opening with the audacious “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” a story in direct conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin’s unforgettable “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” How Long ‘Til Black Future Month includes among other joys an adventure tale set in a steamfunky 19th-century New Orleans (“The Effluent Engine”); a strangely plausible, deeply moving depiction of the virtual survivors of a real-life apocalypse (“Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows”); and an opulently sensual account of wealthy gourmets playing havoc with taste and time (“Cuisine des Mémoires”). Plus the appearances here of “Stone Hunger,” set in the world of her acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy, and “The Narcomancer,” set in the world of her Dreamblood duology, help us see all forms of Jemisin’s writing as part of a glorious whole.

The twenty-two stories in How Long ‘Til Black Future Month span more than a decade. They’ve been collected from sources as diverse as online genre venues, printed anthologies, literary magazines, and podcasts. Gathered together, they mark a new high in Jemisin’s stellar career. As she tells us in the book’s introduction, short stories are where Jemisin started out. That makes them the perfect jumping-off place for subsequent stages in her bright artistic future. Read them now and you’ll be ready for whatever comes next. 

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• The Ones Who Stay and Fight
• The City Born Great
• Red Dirt Witch
• L’Alchimista
• The Effluent Engine 
• Cloud Dragon Skies 
• The Trojan Girl
• Valedictorian
• The Storyteller’s Replacement
• The Brides of Heaven
• The Evaluators
• Walking Awake
• The Elevator Dancer
• Cuisine des Mémoires
• Stone Hunger
• On the Banks of the River Lex
• The Narcomancer
• Henosis
• Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows
• The You Train
• Non-Zero Probabilities
• Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters
• Acknowledgments

Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky, seat of the ruling Arameri family. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with a pair of cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate — and gods and mortals — are bound inseparably.

The Broken Kingdoms

Oree Shoth sees magic—and nothing else.  She paints landscapes by touch and scent, and uses a staff to navigate Shadow, the city built at the roots of the giant tree whose branches cradle the palace of the all-powerful Arameri dynasty. When a derelict god shows up on a neighborhood muckheap Oree takes him under her wing, an act which entangles her in a cosmic feud thousands of years old.  For the gods hold ancient grudges and commit horrific crimes, letting mortals suffer the consequences.  Can innocence redeem them?

In The Broken Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin continues to dazzle us with the treacherous machinations of a pantheon of rivals—the fascinating, maddeningly self-centered deities introduced in the first book of her genre-redefining Inheritance Trilogy.

The Kingdom of Gods

Sieh the Trickster, a billion-years-old child and first godling grandson of the fearsome, universe-spawning Maelstrom, plays too hard with a mortal brother and sister and falls in love.  When a strange accident strips Sieh of his powers these two royal scions of the Arameri dynasty--the family who once enslaved Sieh and his father--must literally move heaven and earth to save him, while the implacable vengeance of a neglected deity threatens to shred all existence to rags. 

In The Kingdom of Gods, the glorious conclusion to N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, death, lust, betrayal, and mercy collide.  With unhesitating skill and deep empathy the author depicts a life turning from dream to reality, from mockery to maturity, from making wishes to making truth. 

The Awakened Kingdom

Encompassing a fresh-born godling’s origin story and three tales showing us Jemisin’s more familiar characters in their adventures beyond her novels’ pages, The Awakened Kingdom and Other Stories gives readers of The Inheritance Trilogy what we all long for: a return to its deep, wild magic. In the title novella we meet Shill, offspring of Yeine, Nahadoth, and ‘Papa Tempa’. All godlings have a true nature, and Shill is eager to discover hers. She’d better do it quickly, before she hurts or kills anyone irreversibly or ends up banished from the mortal realm.

Each part of “Shades in Shadow,” the triptych following Shill’s story, expands on a passage from the original trilogy. “The Wild Boy” tells how Nahadoth, god of night and chaos, comes to be shaped by a mortal as cruel and fascinating as himself. “The God Without a Name” is the voyage of Nahadoth’s once-human avatar through eternal whoredom and divine pimphood. In “The Third Why,” the demon Glee searches for the god who is her father and finds crucial answers to questions about her existence, her father’s fate, and how the world can be made better.

Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies

Dreamblood

The Killing Moon

Gatherer Ehiru of ancient Gujaareh is no murderer.  He escorts faithful followers of the Dreaming Goddess from the waking world to the sweet, infinite rest of their afterlives.  But a royal monster and corrupt priests force him to face an overwhelming, all-consuming horror: he and his loving acolyte Nijiri are being used in a secret bid to breach divine peace and grant a greedy politician vampire-like powers.  Can Ehiru ally himself with Sunandi, ambassadress of the enemy Kisua, and defeat the foul plan of his land’s rotten, centuries-old order?

The Shadowed Sun

Wanahomen, Crown Prince of conquered Gujaareh, rides and raids in secret, hidden among the hunting parties of nomadic barbarians.  He wants to forge alliances with them and others against his people’s ancient enemy, the invading Kisuati.  More than he hates Kisua’s usurping soldiers, though, Wanahomen fears the Gatherers, Healers, and Sentinels of Gujaareh’s own Hetawa, the religious order that slew his father.  Only Hanana, the first woman to become a Healer and now the Hetawa’s living pledge to fight by Wanahomen’s side, can help him overcome that fear and claim their country’s rightful peace.

N.K. Jemisin won Hugo Best Novel Awards for all three books of her Broken Earth series, and she received a Locus Award and major award nominations for the novels of her earlier Inheritance Trilogy. But before earning even her earliest acclaim she wrote the Dreamblood Duology, beginning with this book, The Killing Moon, published less than a year after Inheritance’s last volume.  Seeming to emerge so suddenly from her uncompromising imagination, this deep, vivid, fully-formed picture of the fantasy lands of Gujaareh, Kisua, and barbarian Banbarrah immersed expectant readers in a thrilling atmosphere of African-inspired magic.

Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies

Lettered: 52 signed copies, bradel bound, housed in a custom traycase

Lettered: 52 signed leatherbound copies, housed in a custom traycase