NOTEWORTHY PAPERBACKS

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

PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser. (Picador, $22.) This excellent biography explores Ingalls’ childhood and rise to prominence, and refreshes our understanding of American history, from Native Americans to the homesteaders who displaced them. The book, one of the Book Review’s 10 best of 2017, traces the “Little House on the Prairie” author’s role in shaping the mythology of the American West.

COCKFOSTERS: Stories, by Helen Simpson. (Vintage, $16.) Nine delightful stories touch on aging, unexpected connections and more; the title selection follows a woman searching for her glasses on the London Underground, with serendipitous results. Times reviewer Elinor Lipman praised these stories — and their “emotional hobgoblins that throw the characters rewardingly off-kilter.”

DIVIDED WE STAND: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics, by Marjorie J. Spruill. (Bloomsbury, $24.) In 1977, more than 20,000 activists, celebrities and other luminaries descended on Houston for the National Women’s Conference to iron out a unified rights agenda. Spruill tells the story of the conference, which is largely unknown now, and its lasting, unintended policy consequences.

THE LOCALS, by Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $18.) The residents of a quaint Berkshires town see their lives begin to change when a hedge fund titan, spooked by the Sept. 11 attacks, moves his family there. The story gives voice to a diverse set of white, working-class residents and their complicated relationships to the elites who pass through the town. Times reviewer Lucinda Rosenfeld called the novel a “quietly engrossing narrative that dishes out its food for thought in sly, quotable lines.”

WORLD WITHOUT MIND: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer. (Penguin, $17.) The concentration of information and power in a handful of companies — including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — imperils both individuals and society, Foer argues. Drawing on the intellectual history of computer science, from Descartes to Alan Turing, he cautions his readers against what he sees as a “knowledge monopoly.”

HOME FIRE, by Kamila Shamsie. (Riverhead, $16.) In a modern-day “Antigone,” Shamsie examines the competing identities and loyalties of British Muslims. Isma is pursuing her Ph.D. in America after raising her two younger siblings, but worries especially about her brother, an ISIS recruit with second thoughts. As Isma’s sister tries to bring her brother home, the personal and political collide.