This debut novel by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad 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.
