-- This title is available for preorder and will ship on or after its release date: November 11, 2025 --

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.

BIO

C.J. Farley was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and lives in New Rochelle, NY. A graduate of Harvard University, Farley is the author of the acclaimed fantasy adventure novel Game World and the best-selling biography Aaliyah: More Than a Woman, which was adapted into a hit Lifetime movie. Farley’s young adult novel Around Harvard Square won an NAACP Image Award and was named a 2020 Honor Book by the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. 

REVIEWS

“With prose as provocative as it is entertaining, WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART brings readers face-to-face with AI in fiction's most original and visceral way yet. A story about the cost of getting ahead without selling your soul, Farley's latest shows that machines are not inert, but living reflections of our own society. This novel couldn't have come at a better time.” -- Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author of Black Buck

“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)

“This brilliant book is the novel we urgently need right now. In an addictively readable way, it weaves together insights about love, race, gender, and work in the era of Big Tech. This is the first great AI novel of our time, and it is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.” -- Walter Isaacson, New York Times best-selling author of “Steve Jobs” and “Elon Musk”

[H]  William Morrow & Company  /  November 11, 2025

288 pages