Fans of Maine writer Cathie Pelletier have to make room on their bookshelves. Pelletier, who lives in Allagash, is out with two new books this fall, and both represent a departure for the acclaimed novelist who is best known for writing about the fictional Maine town of Mattagash. Both new books are nonfiction.

She shared writing credits with theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates Jr. for “Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe,” a book that challenged her in ways she did not imagine and one that “changed me completely” as a writer. The other is a memoir that she cowrote with her longtime Cajun fiddler friend, Doug Kershaw, “The Ragin’ Cajun: Memoir of a Louisiana Man.”

The Einstein book is a story of adventure, as Pelletier and her writing partner detail the efforts of seven astronomers who traversed the world a century ago to study solar eclipses so they could prove Einstein’s theory of relativity to be correct. Doing so would help confirm what would become a foundation of modern physics and key to our understanding of space and time. Until then, Einstein’s theory hadn’t been tested. To prove the theory right or wrong, teams of scientists traveled to far-flung places to observe and photograph starlight as it passed the sun during the eclipse. They succeeded in May 1919, when a British team led an expedition to northern Brazil.

The Kershaw book is a story of adventure, too. The writer and musician are friends going back to Pelletier’s Nashville days, when she hung out with country musicians and dabbled in songwriting. The book is a new version of Kershaw’s memoir that Pelletier helped him write 20 years ago. “It needed total updating,” she said. “Twenty years is a long time to leave out of a memoir.” Kershaw tells stories about growing up in the Louisiana swamps, rising from poverty, overcoming addiction and other personal challenges, and succeeding at the highest levels of music.

In various stages, Pelletier has been juggling both books these last few years, moving between country music, which she knows well, and theoretical physics, which she knew very little about but has become somewhat of an expert on, relatively speaking. “It was very interesting,” she laughs. “I was talking to astrophysicists, and they were asking me questions.”

Pelletier felt certain a publisher would reject her Einstein book proposal if she didn’t have a credible cowriter. She found her guy on a TurboTax TV commercial. That tax service recruited real-life geniuses for cameos in an ad campaign that carried the tagline, “It doesn’t take a genius to do your taxes.” Gates appeared in one of the commercials, and Pelletier responded to what she perceived as his kind demeanor. “He seemed so friendly and personable, so I Googled him,” she said. “I saw that he was a National Medal of Science recipient, and I thought, ‘To hell with it, I’m going to ask,'” she said.

She sent an email to Gates that evening and got a response the next morning. “He said he had been waiting for someone like me to ask him for a number of years,” Pelletier said.

In a phone interview, Gates confirmed the story. Much has been written about the scientists involved in proving Einstein’s theory correct, Gates said, but no one had written about them from a human perspective. Gates thought that was imperative.

“There were two main reasons this project was extraordinarily important to me. One of them has to do with the young people who are ultimately going into science and the so-called STEM fields. When you are a young person learning about these fields, you learn about the greats of the past, and they cast giant shadows,” Gates said by phone from Brown University in Rhode Island, where he directs the Brown Theoretical Physics Center. “It is particularly important that future generations of potential strivers, especially those from underrepresented communities within STEM fields, to understand the apparently giant shadows in their disciplines are cast by people as human as they. These future achievers must know that within them is the means to leave these same seemingly mythical legacies.”

The other reason, he said, is that pop culture tends to trivialize science. Shows like “The Big Bang Theory” create false impressions of scientists. He wanted a book about science written from a nonscientific perspective. “Hollywood is just way off the mark. I wanted people who were not interested in the STEM fields to be able to read this book and appreciate the human struggles these people – even Einstein – went through, so they get a sense, ‘That person is not that different than I am,'” Gates said. “It is my hope ‘Proving Einstein Right’ shows that great accomplishments in these fields are done by people, beings not too terribly different than they are as human beings.”

As a storyteller, Pelletier is a master at finding the emotional core of a person. For the Einstein book, she discovered the personalities and motivations of the scientists by tracking down their children and grandchildren and asking questions that no one had asked of them before. It was like detective work. At home in Allagash, she spent endless hours on the internet, reading, researching and reaching out. The more people she found, the bigger the book became.

What began as a proposal for a short book focused on the 100th anniversary of the May 1919 eclipse became something much bigger. The book, published by PublicAffairs, came out in late September. “We missed the deadline for the 100th anniversary, but we were able to tell a much bigger story,” she said.

She and Gates worked together nearly four years, all by phone and email. They’ve met in person just once, at a book-launch event at Brown in early October. He will be in Maine this week to talk about the book with Pelletier, from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at Books-A-Million in Bangor, and from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble in Augusta.

Pelletier felt challenged in ways she hadn’t been before. She has written several novels, a children’s book, screenplays and songs. “I always wanted to play in other areas of the creative sandbox,” she said. “I never wanted to be just a novelist.”

Writing nonfiction is “amazingly difficult. … Fiction writers have the truth at our fingertips. Everything in a novel I have written is true, because I am god of that world.”

She never had to write a bibliography before and, particularly with her Einstein research, never confronted so many errors of fact that had been part of the public record and repeated over time. “I kept finding all these mistakes in the science books,” she said. “And they just kept repeating these mistakes. There is so much misinformation floating about. At some point, I realized my job was to find out the truth, so I began contacting the children and grandchildren of these astronomers and began asking questions. I hope we set the record straight.”

She’s not done with nonfiction. She just finished a book about Vietnam and has plans for at least two more books of nonfiction, one about snow and another based on a story that came out of “Proving Einstein Right.” After all of that, she will go back to fiction. Pelletier has about 60 pages of notes for her next Mattagash novel.

She also has time. She is 66, but feels half her age. “I still feel 30. I don’t know that I am not 30,” she said. “I am not a ballerina. I am not a baseball player or skater. If I still have my health, I will write into my 90s.”

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