The Obelisk Gate: The Broken Earth, Book 2 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Robin Miles (Narrator), N. K. Jemisin (Author), Hachette Audio (Publisher)

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This is the way the world ends, for the last time.

The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night.

Essun - once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger - has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead there is Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, with a request. But if Essun does what he asks, it would seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

Far away, her daughter Nassun is growing in power - and her choices will break the world.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

Listening Length

13 hours and 19 minutes
Author

N. K. Jemisin
Narrator

Robin Miles
Audible release date

Aug. 16 2016
Language

English
Publisher

Hachette Audio
ASIN

B0719FKFVH
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	13 hours and 19 minutes
Author	N. K. Jemisin
Narrator	Robin Miles
Audible.ca Release Date	August 16 2016
Publisher	Hachette Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0719FKFVH
Best Sellers Rank	#2,209 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #21 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #186 in Epic Fantasy (Audible Books & Originals) #355 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

7,249 global ratings

5 star		68%
4 star		25%
3 star		6%
2 star		1%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Amazon Customer

did not disappoint

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

After how great the first book was I knew I had to pick up the next volume but in many trilogies the middle book tends to be lack luster. However, this was not the case. It was a great read and couldn’t put it down! On to the last book!

Helpful

Just as good as the first book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 27, 2022

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Couldn't put it down!

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Philip De Groot

It was interesting but I think there are more authors who write bette stories.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 7, 2021

Verified Purchase

The trilogy is not bad. It is well crafted. I held my attention. Its easy to rate every book you like as a four or a five but that makes it difficult to then indicate that other books by other authors are better. This does not compare to some of the books written by Guy Kay, Neil Stephenson or Brandon Sanderson.

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John Dunphy

Great book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 12, 2022

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After reading the first,had to buy the second.

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James Hutchinson

Good Read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 31, 2021

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A book with a good storyline and well developed characters. The story is told from several points of view that eventually link.

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Sara M. Humphreys

Mesmerizing

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

The book demands understanding cultures and languages, learning through reading. It’s a total mind-shift that’s worth the work. This is a book that critiques race, politics, climate change and much more. The who,e series blew me away.

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Puffy eyes

Absorbing and compelling

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 31, 2020

Verified Purchase

This beautifully written story makes you feel deeply, lonely and courageously. The most compelling part of the story is that of loss and sadness for how the world evolved from what it once might have been.

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AdamV

There is a "dictionary" of terms at the back of ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 4, 2018

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There is a "dictionary" of terms at the back of the book which I only discovered at the end. The reader should find this first and use it as there are a very large number of words that one needs to know.

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Top reviews from other countries

Spencer1124

An excellent sequel in a unique and page turning fantasy trilogy!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 6, 2022

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Wow, the second book in this trilogy has reminded me just why I loved the first book so much.

The Obelisk Gate returns to Essun’s life, she has found a safe place to wait out the season. But, there are people from her past wanting things from her, and her daughter is still missing.

Jemisin’s world building and characterisation is flawless. I find myself completely swept up in the world, lost to reality around me. The world building and plot is quite complex. I do have to focus a lot when I am reading and had to look up a recap of the first book before picking this one up. If anyone has the time, and wants to read this trilogy, I recommend reading them together so that you can follow the complex plot in an easier way. That being said, once I remembered who everyone was, and what was going on, I fell completely back in love with this series.

One part of this book made me feel quite emotional. I ended up pausing to read the passage over and over again, it was so beautiful. I am left with a. million questions, and don’t fully know what went on towards the end of this book. However, I do feel a deep sense of calm within me. These books truly give the reader the ability to join another world, away from this one. Jemisin is a wonderful writer who has created an incredibly rich world that I cannot wait to return to.

I recommend this series to fans of fantasy, it is quite complex at times, but still suitable for newbies to the genre (like myself!).

A. Whitehead

A strong sequel to The Fifth Season

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

A new Fifth Season has fallen on the world, the worst one in history. It may last a thousand years and forever end what vestiges of civilisation remain in the Stillness. One orogene, battered and dying, has a plan to end the Season and indeed all of the Seasons: to recapture the Moon, which was moved out of its traditional orbit more than a thousand generations ago, unbalancing the world. Recapturing the Moon requires that Essun find and harness the powers of the Obelisk Gate. But this may be harder than she thought, as enemies are moving against her new-found home and, in the distant south, her daughter discovers that she herself has an unforeseen destiny.

The Obelisk Gate is the sequel to the excellent The Fifth Season and the middle volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin's critically-acclaimed take on the venerable Dying Earth subgenre. The Fifth Season was a highly accomplished novel, describing a brand new world with skill and intelligence and blending together elements of fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction and a dash of the weird to create something compelling and interesting.

The Fifth Season was also helped by its structure, in which we follow the same character at three different points in her life. The story rotated through each version of the character in term, gradually giving the readers all the pieces to assemble the full narrative. It was a great literary conceit, well-conceived and executed, which allowed the reader to really get to grips with the character.

The Obelisk Gate can't use the same structure, so instead adapts it by moving between Essun's story and that of her daughter Nassun. Whilst the first book was an extended road trip, the second book alternates between Essun's static story and Nassun's long journey across thousands of miles into the far south. This changes things up nicely and means that Essun, now a guest of the community of Castrima, has to actually stay put, learn what's going on from Alabaster and help defend the community.

It does mean a slightly more uneven book than The Fifth Season. Not actually a huge amount happens in this novel, especially for Essun's storyline, and some implausibility creeps in when you realise she is spending months and months hanging around in Castrima (to allow Nassun to travel many, many thousands of miles from almost the equator into the Antarctic region) but doesn't seem to really learn a lot of new information despite Alabaster being right there. That said, there is quite a decent amount of character building and atmosphere here and Castrima, a subterranean city suspended in a giant geode, is a terrific piece of worldbuilding.

Nassun's storyline is more dynamic and disturbing, as her father tries to take her to safety but instead brings her into an even more dangerous and unstable situation, with her own burgeoning powers to contend with. There's a dark mirror here to Essun's childhood upbringing as related in the previous novel, with the feeling that Nassun is what Essun could have become if she was indulged more instead of tortured.

The result is a sequel which expands on the world and the story but, in a common failing of middle volumes of trilogies, can't quite match the relentless pace and sense of discovery from the first book. There's a lot of introspection in this novel which is beautifully written, but risks redundancy later on. However, the book ends with an explosive confrontation between Castrima and a rival community which once again shakes things up and leaves them in an interesting place for the final book in the series to pick up on.

The Obelisk Gate (****½) is a readable and strong sequel to The Broken Sky, if a slightly less original and relentless one. It is available now in the UK and USA. The story concludes in The Stone Sky.

3 people found this helpful

Georgiana89

different but worthwhile sequel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

I absolutely loved the first book in this trilogy. I went straight on to Book 2, but was nervous about how it would compare - partly because it would be hard to top or match such a strong opening, partly because sequels often tend to fall flat, and above all, because the structure of book one made it feel very self-contained and I was unsure how that could be replicated. Specifically, I loved the way that all three, seemingly different narrators turned out to be the same girl/woman at different points in her life and her journey. But with that surprise out, and the past sections having caught up to the present section, I wondered how this instalment could possibly achieve the same sort of effect. I turned out still to have three narrative strands, but while one was still "you" (aka Essun), there was also Nassun (her daughter, more of a plot device than a character in book one), and Schaffa, Essun's former teacher/mentor/father figure and villain of the first book.

I didn't find the structure quite as compelling as in the previous one, but it made up for it by giving a wider spread of points of view, to help readers better understand the characters and the world.The previous book felt rather like a character study, and while those elements were still maintained, this broadened out the focus. There was a lot more about the history of the world, the mysterious obelisks and stoneeaters, and the causes, nature and limits of oregeny, and I really liked this deeper world building.

In some respects - perhaps because of the greater variety of narrators, perhaps because of the more fantastical focus - it felt like quite a different book to its predecessor, but ultimately, it maintained most of what made that special and added some great new elements, so is definitely a worthwhile sequel.

5 people found this helpful

Rossen V

More of the same

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2021

Verified Purchase

Basically the same book.
It goes on and on about the main idea of the books (Society hates the magicians, which is bad. It - society - has created different ways in repressing the magicians. Father willing to kill his two children because they’re magicians? C’mon). I guess that’s the main idea of the books.
The setting is great. They are slowly revealing the veil covering the dead civ mysteries.
The characters I am not sure about. Surprising, illogical. The relationships feel real.
I want to see characters dealing and using their powers solving every day problems. Helping with the dishes or laundry…

jfmdac

Better than the first volume

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Having struggled though The Fifth Season, I was hoping for better with this one, and I have to say I did like it better. The narrative was more straightforward timeline-wise, and the story itself was more interesting, and I started to engage more with some of the characters. Still too much pointless swearing, but I just about managed to ignore most of it, so that it came to resemble an annoying fly that wouldn't go away.
I am liking the "world-building" more, and can relate more to the atmosphere she has created. I also like that she hasn't put much effort into describing what happened in volume 1 for people who started with volume 2. If you're gonna read a trilogy or whatever, then start at the beginning.
Now hoping to find the final volume at least aas good as this one.

One person found this helpful

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The Obelisk Gate: The Broken Earth, Book 2 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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