Get to the Heart of - Books for Adults

Fiction

Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer's chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all.

At twenty-two years old, Cece Cordell reaches the pinnacle of her career as a ballet dancer when she's promoted to principal at the New York City Ballet. Even as she celebrates the achievement of a lifelong dream, Cece remains haunted by the feeling that she doesn't belong. As she waits for some feeling of rightness that doesn't arrive, she begins to unravel the loose threads of her past--an absent father, a pragmatic mother who dismisses Cece's ambitions, and a missing older brother who stoked her childhood love of ballet but disappeared to deal with his own demons. 

A heartfelt novel about three generations of hilarious, unconventional, ambitious women navigating bad dates, a spiteful HOA board, reemerging exes, and secrets that refuse to remain hidden. Join the Desai women on a shared journey of self-discovery as they dare to live their most vibrant lives.

City of Laughter spans four generations of Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.  Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter tangles beautifully with queerness and spirituality, zigzagging between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

Still reeling from the sudden death of her mother, Jess is about to do the hardest thing she's ever done: empty her childhood home so that it can be sold. As she sorts through a lifetime of memories, everything comes to a halt when she comes across something she just can't part with: an old set of encyclopedias. In the process of finding the books a new home, Jess discovers an unusual archive of letters, photographs, and curious housed in a warehouse and known as the Museum of Ordinary People.

A cranky old oxygen farmer on the Moon stumbles onto a century old secret that threatens to derail the first mission to Mars, destroy the Luna colony, and maybe even life on Earth.

Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising her daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed onto her like a birthright. 

After a period of imprisonment, Nealon returns to an empty house in the west of Ireland to find his wife and young son missing. Then he gets a call from a man who claims to know what's happened to them--a man who'll tell Nealon all he needs to know in return for a single meeting. In a hotel lobby, in the shadow of an unfolding terrorist attack, Nealon and the man embark on a conversation shot through with secrets and unknown dangers, a verbal game of cat and mouse that ranges from Nealon's past and crimes to Ireland's place in the world order to the location of his family.

Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she’s quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails.

On a remote archeological site in Greece, the mythic home of the first Olympics, four women discover an unusual artifact. It's a piece of history that definitely shouldn't exist. And for the head archaeologist in charge, a relic himself, it means something's gone horribly wrong. 

When her heightened sense of smell disappears, jeopardizing her career, Poppy Patel, a gifted Paris perfumer, returns home to tend to her grandmother's aromatic garden only to discover it has been uprooted and destroyed, while navigating family drama, childhood friendships and a former love to heal an unscented life.

Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It's been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín, who had always been the bridge between them. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother's handwriting: Perdóname si te falle. Recuerda que siempre te quise. ("Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.") But what would Paula need forgiveness for? Now newfound doubts and old memories come flooding in, complicating each woman's efforts to carve out a good life for herself--and to support the other in the same. 

Mother of two Liv Green barely scrapes by as a maid to make ends meet, often finding escape in a good book while daydreaming of becoming a writer herself. So she can't believe her luck when she lands a job housekeeping for her personal hero, mega-bestselling author Essie Starling, a mysterious and intimidating recluse. The last thing Liv expected was to be the only person Essie talks to, which leads to a tenuous friendship. But when Essie dies suddenly, a devastated Liv is astonished to learn of her last wish: for Liv to complete Essie's final novel. 

Sophie Shah was six when she learned her mother, Nita, had died. For twenty-two years, she shouldered the burden of that loss. But when her father passes away, Sophie discovers a cache of hidden letters revealing a shattering truth: her mother didn’t die. She left. 

Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time—his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed.
Determined to uncover the truth that a powerful organization wants to keep hidden, Bern will stop at nothing to right history's wrongs and give Josephine the recognition she deserves.

Elise Armstrong, Carmen Bradshaw, and DeeDee Davis meet in a yoga class. Though vastly different, these women discover they all have one thing in common: their mothers have recently passed away. Becoming fast friends, the trio make a pact to help each other sort through the belongings their mothers' left behind. But when they find old letters and diaries, Elise, Carmen, and DeeDee are astonished to learn that each of their mothers hid secrets--secrets that will transform their own lives. 

Nonfiction

From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times.

Italian food writer and historian Luca Cesari draws on literature, history, and many classic recipes in order to enlighten pasta lovers everywhere, both the gourmet and the gluten free. Full of recipes and outlandish anecdotes--from (literal) off-the-wall 1880s cooking techniques to spaghetti conveyer belts in 1940 and the international amatriciana scandal in 2021--Luca Cesari embarks on a tantalizing and edifying journey through time to detangle the heritage of this culinary classic.

Renowned mathematician Marcus du Sautoy shows how mathematics and games have always been deeply intertwined: how games provided some of the first opportunities for deep mathematical insight into the universe; how understanding math can help us play games better; and how the knowledge and enjoyment of both math and games are integral to human psychology and cultures. 

An acclaimed cultural critic presents the story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

Dorothy Lazard grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and '70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge. She vividly tells the story of her journey to becoming "queen of my own nerdy domain." Today Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian, and in these pages she connects her early intellectual pursuits to the career that made her a community pillar. 

The moving memoir of a girl coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling as a scientist at the forefront of the AI/Machine Learning revolution. Fei-Fei Li is known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence (AI). But her career in science was improbable from the start. Moving from China's middle class to American poverty, her family navigated the hardships of immigrant life while struggling to care for an ailing mother at every step. 

Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. 

The discovery of DNA's structure is the story of a race among five scientists for advancement, fame, and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. They were fascinating and brilliant, with strong personalities that often clashed. But it is Rosalind Franklin who becomes a focal point for Markel. The Secret of Life is a story of genius and perseverance, but also a saga of cronyism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and misconduct.

Dr. Gladys McGarey, a centenarian still-practicing doctor and the mother of holistic medicine, reveals her powerful and life-changing secrets for how to live with joy, vitality, and purpose at any age.

Across the ages stars have served as clocks, maps, compasses, muses, and gods, defining both our laws of reality and our dreams of the sublime. How radically different would humanity be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen... nothing? In lyrical yet evidence-grounded meditations he imagines a world without stars, a dramatic alternate history in which we wouldn't understand gravity, where couldn't navigate or have much sense of time, and where our sense of the profound-of art and of the divine-was altered beyond recognition. 

What begins with one freelance travel writing assignment escalates into a whirlwind, globe-spanning journey that would transform Nikki's life. Taking her from the street food stalls of Vietnam to the cascading waterfalls of Argentina, Nikki uncovers shocking truths about her family, comes face to face with a new love interest – or two – and ultimately turns a no-name blog into the internationally celebrated venture of Unearth Women, the first major female-focused travel publication.

Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status—part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival.

Lucinda Williams's rise to fame was anything but easy. Raised in a working-class family in the Deep South, she moved from town to town each time her father-a poet, a textbook salesman, a professor, a lover of parties-got a new job, totaling twelve different places by the time she was eighteen. Her mother suffered from severe mental illness and was in and out of hospitals. And when Williams was about a year old, she had to have an emergency tracheotomy-an inauspicious start for a singing career. But she was also born a fighter, and she would develop a voice that has captivated millions. 

Raised by an impoverished widow who earned room and board as a Bible teacher in 1950s Atlanta, Philip Yancey and his brother, Marshall, found ways to venture out beyond the confines of their eight-foot-wide trailer. But when Yancey was in college, he uncovered a shocking secret about his father's death-a secret that began to illuminate the motivations that drove his mother to extreme, often hostile religious convictions and a belief that her sons had been ordained for a divine cause.