N.K. Jemisin: The Inheritance Trilogy + Q&A
Author photo by Laura Hanifin
“I didn’t want to do anything that might piss people off, because what’s ‘myth’ to some of us is belief to others.”
With The Inheritance Trilogy, New York Times bestselling and three-time Hugo award-winning author N. K. Jemisin weaves a tale of intrigue, betrayal, and passion in a kingdom above the clouds.
N.K. Jemisin is the first author to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and she is a 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up.
Scroll down for info about the individual books in the series, plus questions and answers from author interviews with Jemisin.
Related links
‘The City We Became’ by N. K. Jemisin [Live READ IN COLOUR Book Club Discussion]
2020 Hugo Awards: Arkady Martine, N.K. Jemisin, S.L. Huang, Nnedi Okorafor, Ray Bradbury, More
Monster Complex uses Amazon affiliate links.
The Inheritance Trilogy
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy #1)
After her mother’s mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season.
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. 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 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 together.
“Jemisin sells it. She has a truly impressive skill for taking a plot so labyrinthine it would make a minotaur dizzy and guiding us through it with satisfying clarity. She knows how to time each of her story’s juiciest reveals for best emotional impact. And in her heroine Yeine, she’s given us a refreshingly imperfect protagonist who is neither shrinking violet nor steely-eyed Amazon avenger.”—SF Reviews
The Broken Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy #2)
A man with no memory of his past and a struggling, blind street artist will face off against the will of the gods as the secrets of this stranger’s past are revealed in the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the debut novel of NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind. Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a strange homeless man on an impulse. This act of kindness engulfs Oree in a nightmarish conspiracy. Someone, somehow, is murdering godlings, leaving their desecrated bodies all over the city. And Oree’s guest is at the heart of it...
“Jemisin has plenty of surprises in store with The Broken Kingdoms. The plot is complex and full of diverse characters. This is a strong entry in the trilogy, and I’m hoping the third book is just as compelling since I’m already diving into it…”—The Bibliophage
The Kingdom of Gods (The Inheritance Trilogy #3)
Shahar and the godling Sieh must face off against the terrible magic threatening to consume their world in the incredible conclusion to the Inheritance Trilogy, from Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
For two thousand years the Arameri family has ruled the world by enslaving the very gods that created mortalkind. Now the gods are free, and the Arameri's ruthless grip is slipping. Yet they are all that stands between peace and world-spanning, unending war.
Shahar, last scion of the family, must choose her loyalties. She yearns to trust Sieh, the godling she loves. Yet her duty as Arameri heir is to uphold the family's interests, even if that means using and destroying everyone she cares for.
As long-suppressed rage and terrible new magics consume the world, the Maelstrom—which even gods fear—is summoned forth. Shahar and Sieh: mortal and god, lovers and enemies. Can they stand together against the chaos that threatens?
“I think that Jemisin could not have come up with a better conclusion for her trilogy. The Kingdom of Gods is a fantastic conclusion to a beautiful and heartbreaking trilogy—primarily because it does not focus on the typical things a lot of contemporary fantasy novels focus on. Though there is a lot of political maneuvering, scheming, and mentions and threats of war and bloodshed all over the place, they are not the central focus of the books. Instead, these novels are about characters, and how they relate to one another, whether they be mortals, demons, godlings, or gods...”—Occasionally Random Book Reviews
The Awakened Kingdom (Sequel Novella)
The long awaited sequel to the Inheritance trilogy—a novella by award winning author N. K. Jemisin where a godling must struggle to grow in the shadow of her parents.
Some truths must be learned the hard way. . .
As the first new godling born in thousands of years—and the heir presumptive to Sieh the Trickster—Shill’s got big shoes to fill. She's well on her way when she defies her parents and sneaks off to the mortal realm, which is no place for an impressionable young god. In short order she steals a demon’s grandchild, gets herself embroiled in a secret underground magical dance competition, and offends her oldest and most powerful sibling.
But for Eino, the young Darren man whom Shill has befriended, the god-child’s silly games are serious business. Trapped in an arranged marriage and prohibited from pursuing his dreams, he has had enough. He will choose his own fate, even if he must betray a friend in the process—and Shill might just have to grow up faster than she thinks.
This novella, The Awakened Kingdom, takes place after the events of The Kingdom of Gods. It is also included in the print and eBook omnibus of The Inheritance Trilogy.
The Inheritance Trilogy (One Volume Edition)
After her mother’s death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in this epic fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season.
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. 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.
The Inheritance Trilogy omnibus includes the novels: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods, and a brand new novella set in the same world: The Awakened Kingdom.
“These books were everything that I wanted them to be when I began them, and there isn’t a single thing about them that I would change. They’re painful in the way that good things are painful, where there isn’t a nice bow to wrap things up in but you end up smiling through your tears.”—Speculative Chic
Buy the one-volume edition of The Inheritance Trilogy from Amazon
Q&A with N.K. Jemisin
Q: With diversity being a hot topic at most cons and expos, what can people do to make it go from topic to reality?
“True change can’t be driven just by the people on the receiving end of exclusion and discrimination. True change has to be throughout society. There is a form of change that comes with saying ‘f*** this s***, I’m out’ and going off and doing your own thing, but the people who maintain the ‘standards’ for the genre and who actually put a lot of work and time into building structures that they hope will last, they are going to have to understand for these structures to last they have to make them more welcoming. That is what we’re seeing with the World Fantasy Awards, where people started agitating for change, when it became clear if you going to give this award to black people you have to think about what this means.”—An Interview with dynamic Sci-Fi/ Fantasy Author NK Jemisin (Black Sci-Fi)
Q: I am reading your book right now and some of the things that catch my attention are the mythological elements present in the story—were you influenced by classic mythologies like Greek or perhaps even Hinduism? Did you do any research to build the world/mythology in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms?
“I don’t think there was any single specific influence. I was raised Christian myself, and I’ve been reading Christian and other faiths’ mythologies since I was a child; I love mythology as a subject in and of itself. That includes Greek and Hindu, Egyptian and West African, Haitian, Navajo, and others. There are more similarities than one might expect across all of these. But in terms of research—I did do some, but that was more to excise certain similarities, because I wanted the mythology of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to feel different, not derivative. (Some derivation is impossible to avoid, of course, but it can be minimized.) I also didn’t want to do anything that might piss people off, because what’s ‘myth’ to some of us is belief to others. So I borrowed the structure of many myths, but tried not to appropriate the substance more than I had to.”—Interview | N.K. Jemisin, author of ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ (A Dribble of Ink of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
Q: Did you know from the outset that your current project would encompass more than one book?
“I’d been writing epic fantasy that I think of as inspired by actual epics–i.e. the epic form from Gilgamesh, and so on. Those are usually essentially serial tales, although they’re not necessarily told in order. Successive tales of particular heroes going through various trials and so forth. In the case of The Inheritance Trilogy, I decided to do that with the gods as the focus of the story, and following particular characters as they interact with them. The only point that remains throughout all three books is the pantheon.”—They Are Living Their Own Myths: An Interview With N.K. Jemisin, Author Of The Fifth Season (Electric Lit)
Q: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in The Inheritance Trilogy. When did the idea for the series first come to you?
“Originally, I thought of the story about 14 or 15 years ago, while I was in graduate school. It was probably some kind of reaction to thesis-writing stress; I remember having a vivid and disturbing dream of very strange people. One was a man with stars in his hair. If you tried to touch his hair your hand would just keep going and you’d fall in. Another was a boy juggling these beautiful polished stone balls—which, when you looked closely, turned out to be planets. I woke up in a fever to come up with a narrative to explain these characters. These images sort of fused with all the mythology I’d absorbed over the years and turned into enslaved gods.”—Nebula Awards 2010 Interview: N.K. Jemisin (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America)
Q: Tell us a bit about what some of the books were that really got you interested in fantasy and science fiction.
“I was a giant fan of Tanith Lee, of Octavia Butler, of C. S. Friedman. Kind of all over the place in terms of my interests. But I’ve also mentioned in other interviews that I read a lot of mythology, especially as a child and as a teenager.”—Interview: N.K. Jemisin (Lightspeed)