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A Novel
by C. J. Farley
Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what's real in an age of artificial intelligence.
Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents' deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.
Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian's very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation's gleaming headquarters.
But she sets her suspicions aside when she's recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that's programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott's excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can't unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.
"Farley's Who Knows You by Heart is a timely masterpiece addressing the prevalent racism and sexism in technology and the moral conundrums presented by AI." —Booklist (starred review)
"Farley charges straight toward topical questions about AI and diversity initiatives, and the chemistry between Octavia and Neville draws readers in. If the final product prioritizes popcorn thrills over pointed social critique, readers will be too entertained to mind." —Publishers Weekly
"Witty, incisive, funny and deeply prescient. C.J. Farley has his finger on the pulse of our current moment and exposes the complications of Black life, labor, and thought in the midst of it." —Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America
"The Black Arts movement of the 1960s began the revolt against Anglo standards and liberated Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American writers. But Black Arts writers were mostly poets. Beginning in 1996, C.J. Farley, Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, and Victor LaValle did the same for the Black novel. With his novel about a Black woman's struggles in the world of Big Tech, Farley's 'Who Knows You By Heart' is the first AI novel, and coupled with his vast knowledge of pop culture, he has written a novel about our times." —Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
This information about Who Knows You by Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
C. J. Farley, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Brockport, New York, graduated from Harvard University and served as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Farley's novel Around Harvard Square won an NAACP Image Award and the author's biography Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Farley co-wrote and co-edited the book The Blues with Martin Scorsese and was consulting producer on the Peabody-winning HBO documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. Farley, a former senior editor for the Wall Street Journal and a former music critic for Time magazine, has interviewed some of the greatest musical artists in the world, including Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, Adele, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Radiohead and Taylor Swift. Farley also worked as an Executive Editor at Amazon Inc.'s Audible.
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