This debut novel by the two time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys wowed critics and readers
everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer.
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great
American Read.
It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of
Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female
elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of
it. There are two warring factions within the department: the
Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on
the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to
enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.
Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest
accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new
city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos
ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the
good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the
blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong.
The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of
Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The
notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator
that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger
elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century.
When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes
involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still
missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.
Look for Colson Whitehead's bestselling new novel, Harlem Shuffle!
