The Pleasant Light of Day, By Philip Ó Ceallaigh

It's a long time since I have read a collection of stories so absolutely pleasing on every level. Each of them in the second collection by the Irish writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh is beautifully written – effortlessly readable, but solid and substantial.

Ó Ceallaigh has a gift for describing the mental or emotional with physical images: "The hoofed beast of jealous panic rode through him"; "A dynamo of anger in the middle of her chest powered her whole existence." He is also brilliant at evoking a sense of place: these stories are set, among other places, in London, Guantanamo Bay, suburban America, Cairo, Georgia and Ireland, and in each case you feel that you're walking alongside the protagonist. (Most of the stories centre around a solitary individual, usually male, travelling, encountering people, thinking.)

These stories are full of unexpected events. The traveller in "Tombstone Blues" who stays in a monastery on the edge of the Sahara desert may not think it the likeliest place to find a bottle of Bushmills and have anal sex, but that's what happens. "The Alchemist" is a laugh-out-loud parody of Paolo Coelho.

And, whether the theme is sexual obsession, as in "A Very Unsettled Summer", or, as in the title story, what it's like to be alive and conscious that on a historical timescale you won't be alive and conscious for long (beautifully dramatised by a father's visit with his five-year-old son to the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities), every story makes you feel that you're in the presence of a powerful, questioning intelligence.

Ó Ceallaigh is a philosophical writer in the widest and the best sense of the word.