DOWN WITH THE POOR!, by Shumona Sinha. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. (Deep Vellum, paperback, $16.95.) After a Bengali interpreter who works with asylum seekers in Paris is charged with assaulting a refugee, her resulting self-examination lays bare the callousness of France’s asylum system.
THE HOLY DAYS OF GREGORIO PASOS, by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya. (Two Dollar Radio, paperback, $17.95.) A young Colombian American grapples with injury, a fractured family and his personal identity in this transnational coming-of-age journey.
QUICK FIXES: Drugs in America From Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, by Benjamin Y. Fong. (Verso, $24.95.) In this account, Fong examines America’s historical relationship to nine different drugs, highlighting the tension between an embrace of pharmaceuticals and the belligerence of the “war” on drugs.
FRAGMENTED: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, by Ilana Yurkiewicz. (Norton, $30.) Discontinuities caused by insurance companies, reliance on software and contemporary medical culture are the U.S. health care system’s “greatest problem,” writes Yurkiewicz.
THE MISTRESS OF BHATIA HOUSE, by Sujata Massey. (Soho Crime, $27.95.) After Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s only female lawyer, begins defending a domestic worker against trumped-up criminal charges, she discovers a web of corruption and crime that stretches across Massey’s brilliantly pictured 1922 India.
FLAGS ON THE BAYOU, by James Lee Burke. (Atlantic Monthly, $28.) In Civil War-era Louisiana, an enslaved woman accused of murdering an abusive plantation owner escapes from jail with an abolitionist schoolteacher. Multiple narrators recount the two women’s perilous journey in this thriller.
TO THE LAKE, by Yana Vagner. Translated by Maria Wiltshire. (Deep Vellum, paperback, $17.95.) Anya and her husband, Sergey, flee north to escape a flu epidemic in Moscow. As the disease spreads and their supplies dwindle, the married couple clash with their circumstances and with each other.
IT’S A GAS: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World, by Mark Miodownik. (Mariner, $28.99.) A science writer and materials scientist takes readers on a lively journey through humanity’s understanding of the 10 gases that have shaped it most, from the proliferation of steam power in the 1700s to our changing relationship with carbon dioxide.