THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AIDA HERNANDEZ: A Border Story, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. (Picador, 432 pp., $20.) Our reviewer, Michelle Goldberg, called this “novelistic” real-life tale of a dreamer/deportee who ricocheted between the United States and Mexico “searing” and “illuminating.” “If the book rings true,” Goldberg wrote, “it’s because Aida is such a complex and imperfect figure; she is not whom you’d invent if you wanted to write a social justice parable.”

DISAPPEARING EARTH, by Julia Phillips. (Vintage, 272 pp., $16.95.) This National Book Award finalist, set in far eastern Russia, begins with the apparent abduction of two young sisters. What distinguishes it from most whodunits, our reviewer, Ivy Pochoda, observed, is that it’s less about the girls’ fate than about how their disappearance affects the women in their orbit.

STONY THE ROAD: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin, 320 pp., $20.) According to this “hopeful” and “indispensable guide to the making of our times,” our reviewer, Nell Irvin Painter, wrote, we’re once again in the middle phase of America’s cycle of “Reconstruction (expanded democracy), Redemption (democracy defeated) and the New Negro (black culture’s creation of a counternarrative to white supremacy).”

CONVICTION, by Denise Mina. (Mulholland, 400 pp., $16.99.) A “fiery” Glaswegian heroine on the run decries “the damage done on social networks in the name of truth and transparency,” while trying to “outrace the secrets that keep bubbling up from her past,” in what our Crime columnist, Marilyn Stasio, called an “endlessly surprising” mystery.

RUNNING TO THE EDGE: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed, by Matthew Futterman. (Anchor, 304 pp., $16.95.) A Times sports editor profiles Bob Larsen — who went from coaching high school outliers to training Olympic medalists — in a narrative our reviewer, Katie Arnold, described as “smooth and immediate, almost effortless in its detail, if occasionally breathless, like a good fast run.”

THE QUEEN: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, by Josh Levin. (Back Bay, 432 pp., $18.99.) While Levin’s portrait of the “original welfare queen” doesn’t reveal an honorable hard worker, this National Book Critics Circle winner debunks stereotypes, deeming Linda Taylor, in our reviewer Sam Dolnick’s words, “a singular American scoundrel who represented nothing but herself.”