NOTEWORTHY PAPERBACKS

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

STARTUP, by Doree Shafrir. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) In her debut novel, Shafrir takes aim at the excesses of New York’s tech world. Among its chief characters: the wealthy young executive of a mindfulness app; the subordinate he’s sleeping with; and a reporter on the hunt for a juicy scoop. When their paths collide, the app goes viral — leaving behind a cautionary tale centered on gender, power and wealth.

THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us, by Richard O. Prum. (Anchor, $17.) Prum revisits Darwin’s second theory about sexual selection: that the aesthetic preferences of females have directed evolution. The book, one of the Book Review’s 10 best of 2017, crafts a subversive argument about the role of ornamentation and pleasure.

THE NIGHT OCEAN, by Paul La Farge. (Penguin, $17.) A multivoiced story centers on writer H.P. Lovecraft, the (dubious) diary of his love life and his relationship one summer with a teenage acolyte. As Times reviewer D.T. Max put it, the novel “emerges as an inexhaustible shaggy monster, part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative and the seduction of a good story.”

HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy, by Mehrsa Baradaran. (Harvard University, $19.95.) The banking industry has left behind a large proportion of the United States, forcing people who earn low wages to rely on payday lenders, check-cashing vendors and other types of predators. Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia, calls for restoring a public banking option that would be accessible to low-income workers and families, and relieving the exorbitant cost of financial transactions.

EDGAR & LUCY, by Victor Lodato. (Picador, $18.) Edgar, this story’s plucky and appealing young protagonist, lives with his mother and grandmother, and his father’s accidental death looms. “What makes this disquieting exploration of love and mourning bearable is that Lodato works from a place of compassion,” Times reviewer Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney wrote. “On every page, Lodato’s prose sings with a robust, openhearted wit.”

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY, by Ariel Levy. (Random House, $16.) Loss — of motherhood, of marriage, of a planned life — is at the core of this haunting memoir. Building on her 2013 essay describing a miscarriage while on assignment in Mongolia, Levy, a writer for The New Yorker, revisits her expectations for her life: that she could drive her own plotline and duck the cultural scripts for her gender.