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

WANDERING SOULS, by Cecile Pin >> (Holt, 240 pages, $16.99.) After fleeing Saigon in 1978, Anh, Minh and Tanh never saw the rest of their family again. This novel follows not only the three siblings as they fend for themselves, but the ghosts who hover over them, and eventually, an unnamed, grief-stricken narrator. “What emerges is something special,” a New York Times reviewer wrote: “a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don’t own.”

WORLD OF WONDERS: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil >> (Milkweed, 248 pages, $20.) A poet puts forth a collection of essays that meld reflections on nature with her personal history growing up as the child of Filipino and Indian parents in America. “Each story is a carefully crafted gem,” a Times reviewer wrote.

KANTIKA, by Elizabeth Graver >> (Metropolitan, 304 pages, $17.99.) Graver’s fictionalized account of her grandmother’s journey from the Sephardic Jewish elite in Istanbul to working-class life in Spain, which had expelled her family 400 years before, to finally Cuba and New York, begins in 1907 Constantinople: “This, the beautiful time, the time of wingspans, leaps and open doors, of the heedless, headlong flow from here to here,” she writes.

HOW DATA HAPPENED: A History From the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones >> (Norton, 384 pages, $18.99.) The Times’ chief data scientist and a history professor take stock of the development of data from the 1800s rise of statistics to artificial intelligence today, emphasizing “how contingent — how not set in stone — our current state of affairs is.”

THE SIRENS SANG OF MURDER, by Sarah Caudwell >> (Bantam, 272 pages, $18.) British author and barrister Caudwell, who died in 2000, also wrote detective stories. This newly reprinted third book in her series starring Oxford professor Hilary Tamar, first published in 1989, accompanies Tamar as she investigates a tax lawyer’s “death by misadventure.”

THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen >> (Penguin, 576 pages, $20.) Rosen traces his friendship with Michael Laudor, from their bookish childhood to competing at Yale University to Michael’s diagnosis with schizophrenia and the tragic stabbing of his girlfriend. He carefully examines “the porous line between brilliance and insanity,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her review.