Paperbacks new and noteworthy

The Great Quake: How The Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the

Planet, by Henry Fountain. (Broadway, $16.) In 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake — the second strongest in history — rocked Alaska. In one town, the resulting tidal wave swept away a third of the residents. Fountain, a climate reporter for The New York Times, describes the aftereffects, including the rise of the study of plate tectonics.

The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest

Home, by Denise Kiernan. (Touchstone, $17.) At 175,000 square feet, the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, was the largest private home in the country when it was completed in 1895 by a Vanderbilt heir. Kiernan trains a wide lens on Gilded Age America, particularly after the 1929 stock market crash imperiled the family’s fortunes.

Forest Dark, by Nicole Krauss. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Two successful Americans — a celebrated but stalled writer, and an older lawyer — return to Israel to reconcile their divided selves. Krauss’ illuminating novel toys with questions of identity that resist easy answers. The book centers on characters who “have it all but nonetheless have begun to wander aimlessly across their own lives,” Times reviewer Peter Orner wrote. “Israel, impossible and messy as it is, becomes a conduit for new possibilities.” Ranger Games: A True Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime, by Ben Blum. (Anchor, $16.95.) What drove the author’s cousin, an Army Ranger, to participate in a robbery days before his deployment to Iraq? As Blum investigates, examining his cousin’s gauzy explanations, his story becomes a meditation on social coercion, the limits of human agency and his family’s improbable kindred spirits.