Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “Matrix,” by Lauren Groff. (Riverhead, 272 pp., $18.) Groff ’s allusive and sophisticated narrative style is on full display in this novel inspired by 12th-century poet Marie de France, in which the 17-yearold heroine is cast away to medieval England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey. Reviewer Kathryn Harrison called “Matrix” a “literary springboard into a past whose features offer a mirror to our own time.”

■ “No Gods, No Monsters,” by Cadwell Turnbull. (Blackstone, 350 pp., $18.99.) Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar referred to this first book in Turnbull’s planned trilogy as “a tender, ferocious” story “carried by beautiful, conversational prose.” In it, an event called the Fracture unleashes a world of werewolves and other monsters onto Earth, upending and disrupting the delicate fabric of human society.

■ “The Sentence,” by Louise Erdrich. (Harper Perennial, 400 pp., $18.) Erdrich’s latest novel tells the story of a middle-aged Native American bookstore employee in Minneapolis who lives through the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd while being haunted by her mother’s addiction and death as well as the spirit of an annoying customer who died under mysterious circumstances.

■ “The Family Roe: An American Story,” by Joshua Prager (Norton, 672 pp., $20.) This “ardently reported” epic, as reviewer Anand Giridharadas called it, paints an unflinching portrait of Norma McCorvey, whose 1973 Supreme Court case won women the right to abortion and who later became an anti-abortion activist. Her story, Giridharadas wrote, provides a glimpse into “the inner and outer lives of women squelched and tossed by reproductive tyranny.”

■ “Sojourn,” by Amit Chaudhuri. (New York Review Books, 144 pp., $16.95.) Chaudhuri’s impressionistic and diffusive eighth novel is narrated by an unnamed professor who has been awarded a prestigious position and a generous stipend at an unnamed university in Berlin, where he moves though daily life while reflecting on community and identity.