It is a time of crisis 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 in the department: the Empiricists, who rely on tests and measurements; and the Intuitionists, who can intuit any defects merely by entering an elevator cab. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist, with the highest accuracy rate in the department. But when an elevator goes into freefall on her watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to blame an Intuitionist.

Meanwhile, startling excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, surface, describing Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the modern city. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she is drawn into the search for the missing notebooks and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.

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Look for Colson Whitehead's new novel, Crook Manifesto