Paperbacks new and noteworthy

■ “The Light at the End of the World,” by Siddhartha Deb. (Soho Press, 456 pages, $19.) In near-future New Delhi, Bibi must find a man holding valuable documents. In 1984 Bhopal, a hit man targets a factory operator. Amid the turmoil of independence, a student seeks an ancient Vedic aircraft in 1947 Calcutta. In the Himalayas of 1859, a self-titled “White Mughal” collects magical objects. Somehow, these timelines come together seamlessly in Deb’s epic novel.

■ “A Living Remedy: A Memoir,” by Nicole Chung. (Ecco, 256 pages, $19.99.) Chung, a Korean American adopted by working-class parents, chronicles the brutality of a health care system that enabled the preventable deaths of her father, mother and grandmother. Her memoir thrums with “aching and transcendent longing,” a New York Times reviewer wrote.

■ “The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho,” by Paterson Joseph. (Holt, 432 pages, $18.99.) Based on the true-life story of Sancho, who escaped slavery to become a composer, abolitionist and the first Black British voter, and on a one-man play the author wrote and starred in, Joseph’s book puts forth a fictionalized memoir-through-diaries “with the gumption of prose fiction’s earliest heroes,” according to a Times reviewer.

■ “His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa. (Penguin, 448 pages, $20.) This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is an “intimate, unvarnished and scrupulous account” of the life of George Floyd, who before he was murdered by a police officer in May 2020 grew up in Houston’s Third Ward and dreamed of life as an athlete.