What does power do to those who hold it without love?

Divining Freedom carries that question across more than a century of Black Detroit, following five interconnected families - the Carters, Joneses, Goodwins, Dunbars, and Okoyes - from 1898 to the present day. Through migration and arrival, faith and betrayal, the building of a city and its breaking, their lives cross and recross over generations, bound by blood and neighborhood, by church and inheritance, by the choices their elders made long before them.

This is a novel about freedom not as a single act of escape but as something each generation must divine for itself. Told in movements that take their names from the books of the Bible, it moves through deliverance and judgment, lament and return, toward a hard-won understanding: that knowledge means little until it is tempered with love.

For readers of Homegoing and The Warmth of Other Suns, Divining Freedom is an epic of memory and belonging - vast in its reach and intimate in its detail, a portrait of one city and the families who made it, and were made by it, across the long arc of the American century.