Paperbacks:The Sultan's SealMother CountryThe MatchThe Top Ten: Writers pick their favourite booksMissing KissingerThe Grand Slave Emporium

The Sultan's Seal, by Jenny White (PHOENIX £6.99)

Set in 19th-century Turkey during the political turmoil that gripped the later years of the Ottoman Empire, Jenny White's excellent novel begins with the discovery of a woman's body floating in the Bosphorus. Kamil Pasha, the local magistrate called to investigate, sees that the woman was probably a Westerner; and possibly an important one. A pendant hanging around her neck contains the sultan's seal, so highly prized that the scribes who produce it are confined to the royal palace and provided with fast-acting poison in case they're ever taken prisoner.

The English ambassador's daughter recognises the dead woman as a governess of the royal household and Kamil Pasha starts to think about the death of a similar woman some years earlier. On that occasion, the superintendent of police was sacked because he couldn't find the murderer. Alert to the possible consequences if he fails to solve this new crime, Kamil launches an investigation plagued by difficulties. Why was the woman wearing the pendant? Was she killed because of her connections to the palace or was the motive personal? In either case, the strict codes governing Turkish society mean that many people would rather have the incident hushed up.

White clearly understands the culture and the period in profound detail. Even the minor characters appear complex, seeming to guard secrets well beyond those spilling on to the pages of this book. It's rare to find a writer with such a passion for authenticity who can still serve up a compelling story.

Mother Country, by Jeremy Harding (FABER £6.99)

If it hadn't been for section 26 of the Children Act in 1975, Harding, like every other person who had been adopted, would have had no right to see his original birth certificate - and on it, his mother's name. Before that, the state effectively closed off every avenue for someone wanting to investigate his or her past. A source of joy, then, for the adopted, the act had a different significance for mothers who had given up their children before then. Their decision to do so was based on the belief that the child would never be able to trace them - perhaps not even to know their surname. In Harding's case he learnt that his mother was called Margaret Walsh and that she was working as a counter assistant in the summer of 1952 when she gave birth to him.

As with most memoirs involving a search for identity, there's an element of the detective novel at work here. Telling the story in the present tense might now be commonplace but it's easy to see why: even a simple trip to one of the addresses listed on the birth certificate becomes loaded with anticipation. Unfortunately, it's a game Harding isn't keen to play for long.

This is essentially a very straightforward story told largely in the traditional manner: present-tense introductions give way to past-tense introspection as we learn about his adoptive parents, Maureen and Colin, and the spirit of the 1950s. But, if you like memoirs told like this, there can be few better examples of the genre.

The Match, by Romesh Gunesekera (BLOOMSBURY £7.99)

Sunny Fernando is prone to misjudgements and social awkwardness. Gunesekera's witty, wistful novel follows Sunny from the gaff-prone naivety of his teenage years to an unhappy middle age where the opportunities for him to achieve lasting happiness seem almost to have run out.

Born in Ceylon during the 1950s, Sunny moved to the Philippines with his father, Lester, a journalist. It's in Manila, following a brief glimpse of the middle-aged Sunny living in England in 2002, that we first really get to know him. A flashback from 1970 shows him as a teenager helping his father to organise a cricket match that he hopes will bring the two of them closer together and perhaps help him win over a beautiful girl called Tina. The outcome isn't what he planned. As the political situation in the Philippines deteriorates, he loses faith with his father and leaves Manila to study engineering in London.

It's the first of many serious mistakes: he hates the subject and drifts into accountancy. Eventually he marries and settles in England, has a son and again changes careers, becoming a photographer. Each change sees him grow more rootless and less fulfilled, the magic and romance draining out of his marriage as he ages. It's only after going to see the Sri Lankan cricket team touring England, and a chance meeting with Tina, that he has an epiphany which puts his life into focus. Anyone who plays cricket will know the metaphors it affords for life's trickier moments. Gunesekera uses the sport to create a vivid, heartfelt story full of hope.

The Top Ten: Writers pick their favourite books, ed J Peder Zane (NORTON £9.99)

Ask some writers to create a list of what they think are the 10 greatest works of literature of all time and it's a cue for indignant ranting (or, at least, the literary version). "I find this list of 10 books project to be difficult, pointless and wrong-headed" gripes Annie Proulx - before opting for Homer's Odyssey as her main literary squeeze. Others are less precious: George Saunders only complains that the task was a lot harder than he thought it would be because he first of all had to work out whether there was any point in having a concept of greatness.

Saunders, like many of the other authors, chose a book by a Russian as his number one: Gogol's Dead Souls. According to Peder Zane's delightfully arcane scoring system (10 points for a first-place selection, one for a 10th place), from the 125 lists submitted, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina came out as the overall winner (171 points), followed by Flaubert's Madame Bovary (160), then Tolstoy again, this time with War and Peace (150 points).

The second half of the book offers a short synopsis of every book mentioned in a list and, among the lists themselves, a few authors offer brief appreciations of a particular title. Kathryn Harrison's piece on Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes and Arthur Phillips' praise for Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual are both useful snapshots of brilliant, but often overlooked, novels. An illuminating little project; many of the authors give away far more than they realise.

Missing Kissinger, by Etgar Keret trs Miriam Shlesinger & Sondra Silverston (CHATTO £11.99)

Translated from Hebrew, although so expertly that you'd never know, many of the very short stories in this collection are more thought-provoking than the average novel. Keret's characters don't have epiphanies as much as irreconcilable traumas. It's all very unsettling; and when was the last time a writer genuinely managed to unsettle you?

In "Hat Trick", a magician describes the day his performances at children's parties took an unpleasant twist. Reaching into his top hat to pull out a rabbit, he finds himself producing just the creature's severed head. Alarmingly, the kids love it and he finds himself inundated with bookings but he's fraught with nerves before his next show. "Breaking the Pig" tells of a young boy who trades his obsession with Bart Simpson for Margolis, an "ugly porcelain pig with a slot in its back", when his dad forces him to start saving money. What will happen when the time comes to crack Margolis open? This tale may make you weep. It's a far cry from the title story, where a young man ends up visiting his mother with a 5ft knife after asking his girlfriend what he has to do to prove his love for her ("Don't you go bringing me an ear or a finger or anything like that. It's her heart I want").

A few stories here wander into Splatterpunk territory; others drift into the kind of imaginative space that possibly gave birth to creatures like the Clangers. Whatever freak occurrence spliced the two worlds together in Keret's head, it's unlikely to happen again.

The Grand Slave Emporium, by William St Clair (PROFILE £8.99)

Between 1664 and 1807, when parliament finally passed an act abolishing the slave trade (not slavery - that was to come in 1833), Cape Coast Castle was the African headquarters for the entire British transatlantic slave trade. During that time, approximately 11 million Africans were taken to work on plantations and, of that number, three million were transported by the British. While it was all going on, events at the castle were scrupulously recorded in official records. There also exists, however, a vast archive of unofficial correspondence, including hundreds of notes sent between the castle and the slave ships, and it's this body of work, almost completely unexplored before author William St Clair began his investigations, that gives this book a unique perspective.

Still, to find an African opinion on the castle, St Clair has to turn to a book by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who spent years as a slave in Grenada before being taken to England in 1772. In Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), he wrote of his time in the castle prison: "When a vessel arrived to conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips and cries of our fellow men." This book poses many questions while still seeming too timid to draw stark conclusions. On the last page, watching a party of schoolchildren, St Clair wonders: "Am I right to feel glad that they do not think the Castle has much relevance to their own lives?"