Escape to new place with paperbacks

We still can’t travel much, but here’s a ray of hope: Your neighborhood bookstore is probably open for curbside service. Order one of these new paperbacks, and let it take you to another place.

■ “Big Sky” by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown, $16.99). The great Atkinson put her Jackson Brodie detective series on pause to write a remarkable series of wartime novels (“Life After Life,” “A God in Ruins” and “Transcription”). Now, finally, he’s back, in the fifth and darkest installment of the series. Reading it last spring, I was struck by Atkinson’s masterful juggling of a vast array of secondary characters, as Brodie investigates a network of sex traffickers in a quiet Yorkshire town. You flit in and out of their various viewpoints, but Brodie’s — warmhearted, weary, haunted by loss — always feels like coming home.

■ “Ordinary Girls: A Memoir” by Jaquira Díaz (Algonquin, $16.95). Diaz’s debut memoir tells of growing up in a troubled family in Puerto

Rico. “Díaz is meticulous in her craft, and on page after page her writing truly sings,” wrote a New York Times reviewer. “This brutally honest coming-of-age story is a painful yet illuminating memoir, a testament to resilience in the face of scarcity, a broken family, substance abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, suicide and violence. It takes courage to write a book like ‘Ordinary Girls,’ and Díaz does not shy away from her deepest, most troubling truths.”

■ “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith” by Timothy Egan (Penguin, $18; available June 16). Local author Egan writes about revisiting the Christianity he grew up with while walking the 1,000-mile Via Francigena, a medieval pilgrimage route that stretches from England’s Canterbury to Rome. “‘A Pilgrimage to Eternity’ is one of Egan’s best books,” wrote Mary Ann Gwinn in The Seattle Times, “a moving combination of history and memoir, travelogue and soul-searching, buoyed by Egan’s strengths as a writer.”