Five Ways to Forgiveness

Summary

A companion to Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning Hainish Novels—including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed—Five Ways to Forgiveness tells the story of the planet Werel and its colony planet Yeowe, and how their societies are shaped by the legacies of slavery and revolution.

When the enslaved people on Yeowe rebel and overthrow the slave-owning class, the owners on neighboring Werel launch a war to preserve the master-slave society that undergirds the economy of both planets. Told from the perspectives of those caught in the crosshairs of this struggle—a retired schoolteacher, an off-world ambassador, an enslaved woman, and a historian—the stories in this collection are linked by a mysterious figure called Old Music, an ambassador who is secretly working as an abolitionist and supporter of Yeowe’s liberation.

First published in 1994 as Four Ways to Forgiveness, this is the first standalone edition that includes the fifth story, “Old Music and the Slave Women,” that Le Guin wrote years after to augment this extraordinary, vital suite.