What to read this week: New books by Bridgett M. Davis, Helen Zia and Claire Adam

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, by Bridgett M. Davis. For 34 years, the author’s mother ran an underground numbers racket out of the Detroit apartment where she raised five children — her effort to “make a way out of no way” and a long-held family secret. Davis’ memoir is a loving portrait of her resourceful mother and of Motor City in the 1960s and ’70s. (Little, Brown; $28)

LAST BOAT OUT OF SHANGHAI: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution, by Helen Zia. Refugees have always been with us, but every refugee story is unique. In 1949, after Mao Zedong and the communists took over China, thousands fled the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. This book, by a former Ms. magazine editor, follows four of them on their fateful journeys to Taiwan, America and elsewhere. (Ballantine, $28)

GOLDEN CHILD, by Claire Adam. From Sarah Jessica Parker’s new literary imprint comes this debut by a London-based novelist from Trinidad, homeland of V.S. Naipaul. It’s the story of a rural family and its 13-year-old twin boys — one the family’s great hope, the other a problem child. When the latter goes missing in the Trinidad bush, it turns the family upside down and forces the remaining brother to better understand his sibling. (SJP for Hogarth, $26)