Paperbacks new and noteworthy

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review: Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson

to Flint and Beyond, by Marc Lamont Hill. (Atria, $16.) Hill analyzes such high-profile deaths as Michael Brown’s, Sandra Bland’s and Trayvon Martin’s to explore asystem of negligence and indifference. The state has effectively abandoned those whom Hill calls “Nobodies”: people marked as black, brown, immigrant, queer.

Losing It, by Emma Rathbone. (Riverhead, $16.) Julia, the heroine of Rathbone’s novel, is 26, professionally adrift and — most vexing of all — still a virgin. During previous opportunities, she always demurred, certain that a better one would come along, but now,“my virginity composed about 99 percent of my thought traffic.”When she goes to live with her aunt, her quest to finally have a sexual encounter is complicated by a family member’s revelation. The Wicked Boy: An Infamous Murder in

Victorian London, by Kate Summerscale. (Penguin, $17.) In 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his younger brother were traipsing alone around East London. Days later, their mother was found dead, and Robert was sent to one of England’s most infamous prisons. Summerscale reconstructs

the case and its aftermath with forensic care.

Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch. (Broadway, $16.) After he is violently kidnapped, Jason, a married professor in Chicago, awakes as a different man entirely: His wife is not his wife, his child has not been born and he is working on a brilliant project. As Jason’s various selves confront one another and he embarks on multiple paths, he must grapple with the question of which of his lives is real. Crouch draws on disparate influences in his thriller, which Times reviewer Andrew O’Hehir called “alternate-universe science fiction bolstered by a smidgen of theoretical physics.”