The Pleasant Light of DayPhilip Ó Ceallaigh Penguin, £12.99

A wandering part-time journalist in Georgia; an American in Cairo looking for the heart of the city; souls trying to find each other in the City of the Tribes; and a man who has found the ability to fly (after a few glasses of cheap red wine).

These characters and more inhabit the short stories of Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s latest collection, a peripatetic group of tales that wander from eastern Europe to North Africa, up towards Ireland and across the Atlantic.

Ó Ceallaigh is, on the strength of this book and his debut, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, one of the finest writing talents to come out of Ireland in quite some time.

His themes are in many cases as old as the hills: men struggling with love and destiny, and trying to connect with the intangible parts of the world and with their emotions. But his scenarios and language are polished and modern, razor-sharp in places. Here we have gunrunning in South Ossetia, and a small-time drug dealer folded into a shady secret service after being arrested and tortured in a US facility.

Ó Ceallaigh works his words hard: hardly a verb or vowel isn’t used to maximum effect, but he has little trouble turning events on their head with fantastical twists of plot.

That none of it seems out of place is a testament to his control of the language. His set pieces are like glittering little Polaroids on the page, full of details that build to a satisfying whole, whether the protagonists are in the shady courtyard of an Egyptian tea house or wondering at the cracks that have appeared in their plush apartment following an earthquake in Tbilisi.

A terrific collection.