The Obelisk Gate
The Broken Earth • Book 2
by N.K. Jemisin
Narrated by Robin Miles
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Robin Miles narrates in second person — 'you did this, you felt that' — and somehow it works, making the apocalypse feel disturbingly personal.
- Great if you want: emotionally devastating fantasy that treats readers as intelligent adults
- Listening experience: dense and cerebral, best absorbed in focused sessions
- Narration: Miles owns the unusual second-person POV with unsettling intimacy
- Skip if: you haven't finished book one — this picks up mid-story
About This Audiobook
With civilization collapsing under a cataclysmic fifth season, Essun searches for her daughter while simultaneously being trained by the man who broke the world, Alabaster, whose goal is to teach her to repeat his act on a scale that could end the cycle of destruction entirely. N.K. Jemisin's second Broken Earth novel deepens the political and personal implications of the first, pursuing its second-person narrator through a post-apocalyptic landscape where every survival choice has moral weight.
Robin Miles returns for the second entry in this multiple Hugo Award-winning series, and her narration has become inseparable from the work itself. The second-person voice, which Jemisin uses to devastating effect, requires a narrator who can sustain both intimacy and distance simultaneously, and Miles navigates this with extraordinary precision. The Hugo and Nebula awards are well-earned recognition for a trilogy that used science fiction's tools to ask fundamental questions about complicity and survival.
