The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

N.K Jemisin absolutely crushes her readers by mixing real world themes of cultural conflict and the human condition with hauntingly reimagined worlds — The City We Became is no exception. Book one of this new series is a joyride of magic and myth set in contemporary NYC. A newly awakened force is on the attack, and five people — one that delightfully personifies each of the city’s five boroughs — are called on to come together to protect it. Touching on cultural identity, privilege and gentrification, this perfectly weird and witty fantasy adventure is not to be missed!

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 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316509848
Publisher:	Orbit
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Series:	Great Cities Duology , #1
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	39,474
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. She has been a reviewer for the New York TimesBook Review, and an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time, she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie. 

Editorial Reviews

The book is rich and generous in a way that belies the easy analogues of the plot. The Enemy is white supremacy, police brutality, gentrification, but the book doesn't waste time arguing that those things are evil…Instead, its main project is one of bridge-building, knitting communities together, showing how the embodied boroughs must overcome their own prejudices, their own irritations and limitations, to embrace and trust one another before they can win the fight…The City We Became takes a broad-shouldered stand on the side of sanctuary, family and love. It's a joyful shout, a reclamation and a call to arms.

The New York Times Book Review - Amal El-Mohtar

★ 01/13/2020

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"It's a glorious fantasy, set in that most imaginary of cities, New York. It's inclusive in all the best ways, and manages to contain both Borges and Lovecraft in its fabric, but the unique voice and viewpoint are Jemisin's alone."—Neil Gaiman

"The City We Became takes a broad-shouldered stand on the side of sanctuary, family and love. It's a joyful shout, a reclamation and a call to arms."—The New York Times

"Jemisin is now a pillar of speculative fiction, breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold."—Entertainment Weekly

"A love letter, a celebration and an expression of hope and belief that a city and its people can and will stand up to darkness, will stand up to fear, and will, when called to, stand up for each other."


—NPR

"The City We Became is a raucous delight, a joyride, a call-to-arms, a revolution with plenty of dancing. Eat your heart out, Lovecraft."—Alix E. Harrow, author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January

"Some of the most exciting and powerful fantasy writing of today... Jemisin's latest will attract ... even those who don't typically read genre fiction."—Booklist (starred review)

"The most important speculative writer of her generation...She's that good."—John Scalzi

"A love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author's home of New York... Fierce, poetic, uncompromising."—Kirkus (starred review)

"The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovercraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timely and audacious allegorical tale for our times. This book is all these things and more."—Rebecca Roanhorse, author of Trail of Lightning

"N. K. Jemisin has captured the living, breathing soul of New York City in a way that only a writer of her skill can. The City We Became is a masterpiece that plays by no rules-beautiful, musical, joyfully weird, and as impossibly fantastical as it is deeply true."—Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

"Without a doubt, one of the most brilliant books I have ever had the honor of reading. An homage to New York City, packed with all its love and harshness, and so incredibly inventive that I felt my own imagination and the boundaries of what fantasy can be expand."—S. A. Chakraborty, author of City of Brass

"The greatest fantasy novelist currently writing turns her magnificent eye and ear and heart on New York City, and the result is every bit as full of love and rage and crazy compelling characters as my beloved city deserves."—Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-Winning author of Blackfish City

"One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy."—Salon.com

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2020

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

Library Journal

★ 2019-11-25
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.

Kirkus Reviews