Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “The Sweetness of Water,” by Nathan Harris. (Back Bay, 368 pp., $17.99.) This unconventional post-Civil War novel opens with a white landowner in Georgia who befriends two formerly enslaved

Black men wandering his property in the middle of the night, kicking off an ambitious story of mutual affection between white and formerly enslaved people in the Deep South.

■ “Girlhood: Essays,” by Melissa Febos. (Bloomsbury, 336 pp., $18.) Febos’ eight essays on growing up in a female body — and how it is irrevocably marked by patriarchy — draw on investigative reporting, memoir and scholarship to create a “feminist testament to survival” in a voice that is “irreverent and original,” reviewer Betsy Bonner wrote.

■ “The Window Seat: Notes From a Life in Motion,” by Aminatta Forna. (Grove, 272 pp., $17.) The topics of this essay collection span decades and continents, from the “Renaissance Generation” of Africans “who came of age at the same time as their countries,” to the author’s childhood in Tehran around 1979. According to reviewer Leah Mirakhor, Forna’s “wide-ranging subjects chart a path toward a kind of freedom, to be at home, always elsewhere.”

■ “The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story,” by Kate Summerscale. (Penguin, 368 pp., $17.) This spooky truecrime book tells the enthralling story of an investigator at the International Institute for Psychical Research in 1930s London who joins ghost clubs and attends séances while he investigates a woman believed to be harboring a mischievous spirit in her home. Reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it a “delightful period piece.”

■ “The Plot,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz. (Celadon, 336 pp., $17.99.) A young novelist rescues his stalling career but is riddled with guilt after he steals the sumptuous plot of a novel belonging to a student of his who overdosed two years earlier. Reviewer Elisabeth Egan wrote that Korelitz’s Russian nesting doll of a novel “keeps us guessing until the very end.”

■ “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman. (Picador, 448 pp., $21.) Weisman travels across the world and interviews everyone from evolutionary biologists to art conservators to sketch our planet’s post-human future in this “morbidly fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller,” as reviewer Jennifer Schuessler called it. Originally published in 2007, this reissue includes a new afterword by the author.