Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “The Snakes,” by Sadie Jones. (Harper Perennial, 464 pp., $16.99.) Although actual snakes do slither around the hotel where relatives have gathered in this “scary novel about the corrosive effects of money and power and parenthood,” Times reviewer Sarah Lyall noted, none is as vile as the family’s “human reptiles.” Readers will find Jones’ fifth work of fiction “provocative and propulsive,” Lyall declared, even when they suspect the author of “over-egging the pudding.”

■ “Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh,” by Carl Hulse. (Harper Paperbacks, 336 pp., $17.99.) This behind-the-scenes look at how Supreme Court nominations became so partisan, by a New York Times journalist, is “entertaining and shrewd,” wrote Times reviewer Evan Thomas.

■ “The Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead. (Anchor, 224 pp., $15.95.) With the addition of this Pulitzer Prize-winner about a teenage boy incarcerated for riding in a car while Black, at a “reform school” with unmarked graves, the author of “The Underground Railroad” has produced back-to-back historical novels that, in sum — Times reviewer Frank Rich observed — “offer an epic account of America’s penchant for paying lip service to its original sin.”

■ “The Red Daughter,” by John Burnham Schwartz. (Random House, 288 pp., $17.) Captured through imagined journal entries and letters, this story of the relationship between Stalin’s only daughter, who defected to the United States in 1967, and a young American lawyer (based on Schwartz’s father) is “lively and engaging,” in the words of Times reviewer Susan Ellingwood.

■ “The Story of the Jews, Volume Two, Belonging: 1492–1900,” by Simon Schama. (Ecco, 800 pp., $24.99.) A tale of “serial exile” across four centuries, with “eerie echoes of today’s reactionary xenophobic fever,” this second installment of Schama’s multivolume work, according to Roger Cohen, the Times reviewer, paints a “riveting picture” of “the stubborn, argumentative miracle of Jewish survival against the odds.”

■ “America Was Hard to Find,” by Kathleen Alcott. (Ecco, 432 pp., $17.99.)

The gulf “between the public’s imagination of history and the way it feels to the person living through it” is how Times reviewer Katherine Thompson Walker described the focus of this novel in which the Cold War era is seen through the lenses of three characters, each of whom lands on the cover of Life magazine.