Paperbacks: Enlightenment Penguins Stopped Play Insomnia The Architecture of Happiness The Free and Easy The Millionaires' Unit

Enlightenment by Maureen Freely (MARION BOYARS £9.99)

Best known for her work about mothers and babies, a journalist referred to only as M feels daunted when a woman asks her to help gain the release of her Turkish husband, a political prisoner in the United States. The situation is particularly difficult because the man in question, Sinan, a political film-maker, was M's lover when she lived in Turkey some 30 years before, and his wife, Jeannie, is the woman he left M for. It isn't just Sinan's liberty that is at stake, either; after the American authorities seized him when he arrived in the US to begin a speaking tour, the couple's son, Emre, was taken into care.

In Turkey, unseen forces seem to be shaping M's actions. For years she has believed that Sinan was implicated in a murder; but soon learns that the crime may not have taken place at all. Jeannie's father worked for the CIA but is happy to criticise his former employers publicly. He seems to think the fact the US are holding Emre may have something to do with him. Playing out against a meticulously realised backdrop of Turkey in the years following the Cold War that feels thoroughly authentic, this sinister, complex political thriller snakes to a remarkably subtle conclusion.

Freely's resolve to create the kind of slow-moving intrigue that presents readers with an intellectual challenge is commendable. Although such uncertainty swirls round every character and situation in the novel that it isn't always easy to retain an idea of what the truth might be, every moment spent trying to eke it out is worthwhile.

Penguins Stopped Play by Harry Thompson (JOHN MURRAY £7.99)

Harry Thompson, who died shortly after writing this book, was responsible for some of the best-known British TV comedy shows, including Have I Got News for You and Da Ali G Show. He was also a mediocre cricketer with a unique gift for capturing precisely why the sport is so enjoyed by those lacking all but the most basic skills (holding a piece of wood; throwing something). His team, the Captain Scott Invitation XI (formed during his student days in Oxford because nobody else would let him or his friends play), started life prizing the art of coming second - sometimes going to great lengths to make sure they did so, like having the last three batsmen in a close- run match stand aside and let the ball hit their stumps.

Fortunately, by the time Thompson and his friends decided to undertake a round-the-world tour, the determined losers had left. Those who remained were still pitifully bad and, as Thompson frequently points out, what's bad can only get worse when British Airways is involved; but this book is anything but a paean to uselessness. Trampled by Argentinian fast bowlers, humiliated by Bajans ("What you bowl, boy?" asks an opposing batsman. "Swing," replies their bowler. "That's good," replies the batsman. "Cos I'm gonna swing you right out of da park" ), what transpires might be "profoundly idiotic in every respect" , but nobody lets the side down. The message of Captain Scott, it turns out, is about someone "doing his damndest, win or lose, and having his friends by his side in the end".

Insomnia by Aamer Hussein (TELEGRAM £8.99)

This disarming collection of stories manages to feel both original and slightly old-fashioned. These stories just seem less contrived than much contemporary fiction. They sprawl in a way that's impossible to pin down, being profound, but low key; spiritual, but pragmatic; full of longing, but also acceptance.

In "The Crane Girl", a young Pakistani, Murad, falls in love with a beautiful but manipulative Japanese girl, Tsuru. The two are studying in London during the early 1970s - outside class they go to see Mungo Jerry and the Kinks in Hyde Park, and watch hippies smoke hash and make love in the grass while Hare Krishna people hand out rice and lentils. Murad's love is not returned and eventually Tsuru disappears without warning, leaving him to reflect bitterly on the people he calls his friends while yearning for something more.

"The Book of Maryam" describes a controversial Pakistani writer's visit to a London symposium on the role of the writer in troubled times. While reading from her work she's heckled; what do her political, autobiographical stories have to do with art? The event draws to an abrupt close after it over-runs and the author is left reading her work in the overlit refectory, the college's poet-in- residence and a Critical Theory person talking over her.

These stories feel like the work of an outsider - subtle expressions of alienation in which characters are frequently misunderstood, rarely heard and never feel a real sense of belonging.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton (PENGUIN £9.99)

At a time when the words "house" and "home" seem to have been superseded by the ubiquitous "property", and architecture reduced to the packaging for investment opportunities, it seems almost quaint to find a writer looking at buildings and contemplating the visual order of things. Why are new houses so ugly? Will minimalism make us happier than ornaments? These are the kind of issues that bother Alain de Botton and, even if expecting something dazzling from him is like waiting for a stone to sing, he still manages to rake together enough ideas from other, better minds to make the project attractive.

Maybe his real gift is to think a decade or two behind the times, rather than, as might be expected, ahead of them. This is the kind of book you would have found rolling off a press in the 1970s, before style magazines and postmodern chic took a hold of what purported to be good taste and franchised the deal to the likes of IKEA.

What does a beautiful building look like? This is apparently the "vexed point" on which much of the history of architecture rests. Wittgenstein, de Botton tells us, took three years off to build a house for his sister: "You think philosophy is difficult," he wrote, " but ... it is nothing compared to the difficulty of being a good architect." The Modernists, who separated the "vexed matter" of appearance from the more straightforward one of function, were particularly bad at answering the question. Vexation, conservatism and plenty of black and white photographs; what next from our Philosopher General?

The Free and Easy by Anne Haverty (VINTAGE £7.99)

After an elderly American tycoon suffers a health scare, he experiences a troubling, recurring dream. In it, the people of Ireland, his birthplace but a country he's vowed never to have anything to do with again, plead for his help. It isn't like him to help anyone but, after having the dream for a third time, he decides that he might be wise simply to give the Irish what they want. Resorting to emotional blackmail, he persuades his great-nephew, Tom Blessman, to go and fix things for him - but first Tom has to find out exactly what it is the Irish are lacking.

This proves difficult. Leafing through a newspaper in his Dublin hotel Tom searches vainly for stories of famine and upheaval. Instead, he finds an interview with an Irish film director promoting his new movie: "all that sob stuff, the mangy dogs, all that shite, it's over... I want to look at the present, the positive, something we can all relate to. Love, money, multiplicity of choices." The economy, it seems, is booming. The only clue he can find about what the Irish might want comes when he overhears a radio show in which the studio guest mysteriously speaks "from deep inside the territory of his great-uncle's dream", alluding to a need for spiritual sustenance.

Fortunately this isn't a cue for any dim-witted religiosity, but a witty, acerbic dissection of cultural life in contemporary Ireland. "Money may be our king," states one character, "but it can't be our God." Haverty is a very clever writer, but one who doesn't seem compelled to shout about it.

The Millionaires' Unit by Marc Wortman (PAN £7.99)

In 1916, with the US still holding back from commiting itself to "the bloodiest war the world had yet seen", a group of young American men decided to do something about the situation. Most of them were Yale college students and all were phenomenally wealthy sons of America's early 20th-century aristocracy. They believed that America would be forced to participate in the conflict: "The foreign war would soon strangle world commerce, which was the lifeblood of American growth." As things stood, that might prove disastrous; the US airforce was smaller than Bulgaria's.

Spurred on by that unique sense of responsibility that the hideously wealthy and powerful usually exhibit towards their nations (like gardeners patrolling vegetable patches on the look-out for slugs) and a dilettante fascination with flying machines, they decided to form a flying militia. Christened the "Millionaire's Unit", this college club became the original squadron of the US Naval Reserve; following Armistice, "The rest of the world marvelled: one of the finest and largest air services had grown out of what amounted to little more than a summer camp hosted by a group of college sophomores."

If you're interested in a tale of how the "youthful beginnings of the next generation of the Establishment" developed its leadership ideal, and how these callow youths helped "bring the Great War to a swift end", you'll love this story. Some readers, however, might find Wortman's nostalgia for the nauseating honour codes of the American elite just a little creepy.