Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “Black Cloud Rising,” by David Wright Faladé. (Grove, 304 pages, $17.) This fast-paced Civil War narrative tells a classic war story based on the life of a mixed-race sergeant who served in a unit of Black soldiers, including many freed, recently enslaved people, that helped to hunt down rebel guerrillas in 1863. Reviewer Dwight Garner wrote that this page-turner is “told simply and well, its meanings not forced but allowed to bubble up on their own.”

■ “Pessoa: A Biography,” by Richard Zenith. (Liveright, 1,120 pages, $30.) Despite Fernando Pessoa’s galaxy of personas and pseudonyms, his figure as a Portuguese poet, critic, translator and giant of modernism has become steadily clearer since the discovery of 25,000 pages of his writings in 1935. Zenith’s biography, which former New York Times critic Parul Sehgal called “mammoth, definitive and sublime,” may very well be the sharpest.

■ “The Houseboat,” by Dane Bahr. (Counterpoint, 256 pages, $16.95.) A girl claims her boyfriend has been murdered outside a small town in Iowa, and although no body is found, collective suspicion lands on a loner who lives in a rotting houseboat along the Mississippi River. Through chapters that shift in perspective and move through time, Bahr builds to a nail-biting denouement.

■ “Cost of Living: Essays,” by Emily Maloney. (Holt, 240 pages, $18.99.) In piercing essays on the complex intersections of money, illness and medicine, Maloney describes how a psychiatric hospitalization at 19 saddled her with a mountain of debt and embeds herself into various corners of the American health care system to vividly expose its failures. Reviewer Sarah Manguso praised Maloney’s writing as being “astute, compassionate and lethally funny.”