As the world around us flies aaprt in fragments of plastic and psychosis and the internet is my fidget spinner, an endlessly whirling toy of facts and jokes and horrors, it's odd to find some sort of comfort and catharsis in an epic fantasy novel of such seemingly overwhelming hopelesness and despair as presented in the first two volumes. A massive rift is venting ash and smoke into the sky. The world is reduced to hunkered down communities and roving bands of starving bandits. Roggas, who can control such eruptions and outbursts are despised and feared and murdered on discovery or sent to be brutally trained and used. What future can there possibly be to look forward to?

Essun, travelling with a unique community of orogenes and stills to a city abandoned - largely because Essun killed them all when they invaded her new home - is torn by a desire to save her daughter and take use the obelisk gate to restore the Moon and close the rift. Doing the latter will kill her, however. Meanwhile daughter Nessun in the company of a Guardian travels to an ancient, hi-tech city the other side of the world with a similar plan on a larger scale, but the lessons she has learned incline her to a more catastrophic approach to making the world a peaceful place.

The finale plays out in a masterful and titanic battle of magic and tectonics and physics between the traumatised and damaged hearts and minds of mother and daughter to an ending that did not seem remotely possible or likely in our first introduction to this world. But it felt earned and logical and right. A crowning achievement to one of the the defining fantasy works of the age.