• Like Eat, Pray, Love, Devotion explores the search for faith and meaning in our lives, but addresses the concerns and outlook of those newly entering or adapting to the middle passage of their lives.

• Harper Perennial has acquired the rights to Slow Motion, and will publish a new trade paperback edition in March 2010.

“I had no choice, I needed a more meaningful life, and so I made myself one.” 

In her mid-forties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was—a hodge-podge of carpools, homework, dinner dates, online shopping, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean?
 
Growing up in a deeply religious family that followed traditions instead of subscribing to beliefs, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a sense of connection to something greater. Feeling as if she were plunging headlong into the abyss Carl Jung termed “the afternoon of life,” Shapiro wrestled with self-doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night. Scarred by loss—her father’s early death, nearly losing her son in infancy, the terminal illness of the mother with whom she shared a troubled relationship—Shapiro had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a single question: What did she believe?  Seeking to still her apprehension and spurred on by the Big Questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro courageously embarked upon the daunting quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the spiritual core of a life.
 
In this voyage of the mind and the heart, Shapiro ponders the varieties of experience that she has pursued—from the rituals of her black hat Orthodox relatives  to yoga shalas  and meditation retreats to the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Christopher Hitchens. A reckoning of the choices she has made, and the knowledge she has attained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. A transformative journey at once universal and intensely personal, it offers illumination and inspiration for us all.