The city we became /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An instant NYT Bestseller!



Four-time Hugo Award-winning author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, the first book in The Great Cities Duology, a crackling tale of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City. "A glorious fantasy." --Neil Gaiman



In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.



In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her.



In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.



And they're not the only ones.



Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.



One of TIME Magazine 's 100 Best Fantasy Books of all time

One of TIME Magazine 's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

One of Vanity Fair 's 15 Best Books of 2020

One of Amazon's Best Books of 2020





The Great Cities Duology

The City We Became

The World We Make

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

People feel the moods of the cities they live in. Sometimes the cities themselves become living things, connected to all the lives within their limits. New York City has been born, but there is an otherworldly and dark force determined to destroy those connections and overlay itself. It will take the soul of the city to deal with the enemy. Of course it isn't so simple: New York is six souls: the five boroughs and the whole, and getting them to work together will be challenging. The pains of gentrification, bias, and hatred for anyone "other" is starting to take root, spread by the power that wants to take over. Can these distinct souls find a way to come together before the enemy takes hold, or will the city bend to a power literally out of this world? VERDICT Jemisin (The Broken Earth) writes a harsh love story to one of America's most famous places. As raw and vibrant as the city itself, the prose pushes the boundaries of fantasy and brings home what residents already know--their city is alive. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/19.]--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Publishers Weekly Review

The staggering contemporary fantasy that launches three-time Hugo Award-winner Jemisin's new trilogy (following the Broken Earth series) leads readers into the beating heart of New York City for a stunning tale of a world out of balance. After hundreds of years of gestation, New York City is awakening to sentience, but "postpartum complications" threaten to destroy it. An alien, amorphous force, personified by the Woman in White, launches an attack on New York. Five people--one for each of the city's five boroughs--are called to become avatars dedicated to protecting the city. If they can combine their powers, they'll be able to awaken the avatar of the city as a whole and defeat the Woman in White, but first they'll have to find each other. While the Woman in White works to undermine them, the five avatars, whose personalities delightfully mirror the character of their respective boroughs (the Bronx is "creative with an attitude," Manhattan is "smart, charming, well-dressed, and cold enough to strangle you in an alley if we still had alleys"), learn the extent of their new powers. Jemisin's earthy, vibrant New York is mirrored in her dynamic, multicultural cast. Blending the concept of the multiverse with New York City arcana, this novel works as both a wry adventure and an incisive look at a changing city. Readers will be thrilled. Agent: Lucienne Diver, the Knight Agency. (Mar.)

Kirkus Book Review

This extremely urban fantasy, a love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author's home of New York, expands her story "The City, Born Great" (from How Long 'Til Black Future Month, 2018).When a great city reaches the point when it's ready to come to life, it chooses a human avatar, who guides the city through its birthing and contends with an extradimensional Enemy who seeks to strike at this vulnerable moment. Now, it is New York City's time to be born, but its avatar is too weakened by the battle to complete the process. So each of the individual boroughs instantiates its own avatar to continue the fight. Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star-turned-lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four. Can these boroughs successfully awaken and heal their primary avatar and repel the invading white tentacles of the Enemy? The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city's tapestry even if some white people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only white avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents. In the real world, white people don't need a nudge from an eldritch abomination to call down a violent police reaction on people of color innocently conducting their daily lives, and just as in the book, third parties are fraudulently transferring property deeds from African American homeowners in Brooklyn, and gentrification forces out the people who made the neighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments.Fierce, poetic, uncompromising. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

N. K. Jemisin is an American author and blogger, born in 1972, and based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a B.S. in Psychology from Tulane University and her Masters of Education from the University of Maryland College Park. Her work includes numerous short stories, a novella, a triptych, The Inheritance trilogy, Dreamblood series, and The Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season is a book in The Inheritance trilogy for which she won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Her other awards include Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice, Fantasy (for The Shadowed Sun); Sense of Gender Award, 2011 (for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Japanese version); Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice, Fantasy (for The Broken Kingdoms); and the Locus Award, 2010 (First Novel, for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). She won the 2017 Nebula Award and the 2018 Hugo Award, Best Novel category for The Stone Sky.

(Bowker Author Biography)