'The Fifth Season' is June's pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club

We're excited to announce that N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" is the June pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This."

In "The Fifth Season," the planet is menaced by environmental catastrophe, and its inhabitants struggle to survive. Jemisin's fantasy novel follows the narratives of three "orogenes," individuals who can draw power from the earth to subdue its violence. "The Fifth Season," the first book in her "Broken Earth" trilogy, won the 2016 Hugo Award, science fiction's highest honor.

"Fantasy novels often provide a degree of escapism: a good thing, for any reader who has something worth escaping," wrote author Naomi Novik in the New York Times Book Review. "Too often, though, that escape comes through a fictional world that erases rather than solves the more complex problems of our own…'The Fifth Season' invites us to imagine a dismantling of the earth in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, and suggests the possibility of a richer and more fundamental escape."

In the coming days, we'll post discussion questions for "The Fifth Season," an annotated excerpt from the book, and writing advice from Jemisin. At the end of the month, she will answer your questions on the PBS NewsHour. We hope you'll join us and read along.

Just joining? Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter. You can find all of our book club content here, or look back at our conversations about previous selections for the book club below:

• Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir and literary critique "An Odyssey"
• Emily Chang's exposé "Brotopia"
• Naomi Alderman's sci-fi story "The Power""
• Meg Wolitzer's novel "The Wife""
• Sandeep Jauhar's medical history "Heart""
• Casey Gerald's political memoir "There Will Be No Miracles Here"
• Katie Kitamura's psychological thriller, "A Separation"
• Nate Blakeslee's tale of wolves and the West, "American Wolf"
• Robert Kaplan's mix of road trip and political analysis "Earning the Rockies"
• Lesley Nneka Arimah's short story collection "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky"
• Min Jin Lee's historical family saga "Pachinko"
• Andrew Sean Greer's comic novel "Less"
• Tara Westover's memoir "Educated'
• Dan Egan's environmental portrait "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes"
• Mohsin Hamid's magical novel "Exit West"
• David Grann's true crime tale "Killers of the Flower Moon"
• Jesmyn Ward's lyrical "Sing, Unburied, Sing"