Chris Ware's new graphic novel comes in a cardboard box, like BS Johnson's The Unfortunates, or an old-fashioned board game. Inside, are 14 "distinctively discrete" books and pamphlets of varying sizes. Each one of these stands alone, and since  in theory  they may be read in any order, several members of a comic-loving family could happily read Building Stories over the course of the same afternoon. But they work together, too, combining to depict, in rich and multifaceted fashion, the mostly unhappy lives of the inhabitants of a single Chicago apartment block. Ware's box, then, isn't a gimmick, but a sort of proxy. Like the crumbling building at his story's heart, it's a repository of misery, loneliness and misunderstandings. As Philip Larkin had it: "Home is so sad."

On the ground floor of the building is the old lady who owns it. She inherited it from her parents, at which point her spinsterhood, which might have been only temporary, calcified into permanence. Above her is a young couple. He works nights, the better to avoid his girlfriend, whose weight gain repulses him. He's a vile man, his muffled insults seeping through the building's too-thin floors. But his girlfriend makes it too easy for him to behave badly, trapped as she is in a waiting room of futile hope (every weekend, or so she thinks, is the one when he'll start being nice to her again). When he tells her that he despises her trousers or her skirt, she wriggles out of them obediently, as if by shedding her clothes she will also shed her misery. Finally, there's the top floor, which is rented by a young, single art student (well, she's young and single in some of the books, and not-so-young and not-so-single in others), and it's with this woman, who lost her left leg below the knee as a child, that you feel Ware's interest really lies. When I opened one of the 14 books, and found she wasn't in it, I felt disappointed, longing to get back to her.

Ware's trademark frames are tiny and rigid, confining his characters every bit as much as their too-small bathrooms and their stifling romantic lives. But they also, in this instance, call to mind windows; Building Stories is such an intimate book that to read it is to feel like a Peeping Tom. Lives are thrown wide open, the private moments no one ever sees brought carefully out into the light. A lavatory floods, and induces in its owner an existential crisis. A woman tries, and fails, to do up her jeans. Another woman inserts a tampon. Ware's drawings of people, all dots and circles, are rudimentary on the face of it  and yet no emotion is beyond him. It's amazing, this economy. Even more deft, sometimes he will use some other body part to do the work of a frown, a wince, or a pair of lips pressed tightly together. A woman's waddling backside, huge in tight red trousers, tells a story of repressed anger; a man's flaccid penis  yes, really  somehow articulates all the pressures of recessionary middle-age. As for his apartment building, it constantly underscores the book's theme: the gap between what people hope for, and what they get. Home, as Larkin also had it, starts out as a "joyous shot at how things ought to be". Then it withers. Larkin could see it in the pictures and the cutlery. Ware sees it in a plastic shower curtain and a mustardcoloured armchair. Never before has such a brightly coloured book been so mournful.

I don't want to give the impression that Building Stories is without its faults. On a practical level, older  ahem  comic lovers will sometimes struggle to read Ware's miniature writing, and I must be honest and say that I would rather have been told the best order in which to read its sections (there certainly is one, and I think it's pointless to pretend otherwise). Confusion about past and present sometimes distracts from the deep pleasures of the crammed page. But still, this is a wonderful achievement. It's not only that it is so beautifully and attentively made  though in the age of the Kindle, and of all things disposable, Ware is certainly making a powerful statement. No, it's the sense of belief that gets to you, the absolute commitment to the form. Building Stories does things no traditional novel can, or not without much lumbering effort; and it does other things no comic has hitherto pulled off. No wonder, then, that opening it for the first time makes you feel like a child at Christmas. It's a thing to be treasured, a box of delights.

"Days are where we live." Philip Larkin's line is one that seems to resonate with Chris Ware's new graphic novel. I say that not just because Larkin's bleakness is a tonal presence; but also because of that word "where". It casts days not as stretches of time, but as spaces. Ware, too, is concerned with the spaces in which we live.

Building Stories comes as a big, exquisitely produced box containing 14 different booklets. They vary from pamphlets each page of which are around A2-sized, to a single narrow strip of paper, zigzag folded. A couple are bound in cloth or cardboard. They can be read in any order: and in combination they describe the lives of the inhabitants of a three-story building in Chicago.

On the ground floor is the lonely old spinster who owns the building and rents out the apartments above, dreaming her way through memories of a life barely lived at all. The middle floor is home to a youngish woman whose boyfriend is routinely horrible to her. The top floor is home to the main protagonist, who at first lives there on her own but will go on to move out into suburbia as a young mother. Having once dreamed of writing and painting, she is staled in domesticity: putting on weight, beset with anxiety, frustrated with her husband. She loves her daughter but still pines for her first boyfriend, who abandoned her after an abortion. She wonders where her life has gone.

That is not to forget, incidentally, the two comics dedicated to "Branford, The Best Bee In The World". Branford, a bee whose hive is outside the apartment building, is the only male point of view we inhabit. Given the sexual politics of bees that's a wan Ware joke. This is ostensibly a book about buildings but it's more quietly, too, a book about women's lives.

Somewhere in the ancestry of this volume you can detect Will Eisner's tenement stories, but it couldn't be further from the roustabout resilience of Eisner's work. When you read a Chris Ware comic you can be fairly sure that you'll end up with a migraine from the tiny writing, or suicidal from the worldview, and yet he's so damn good you do it anyway. It's impossible to overstate how meticulously his work hangs together: the symmetries on a single page; the motifs that worm through it; the multiple counterpointed stories.

The building frames and encloses the lives of its protagonists. Days are where we live, and buildings are where we live, and  in Ware's comics  panels are where we live. Ware's style, accordingly, includes strong elements of graphic design and architectural drawing. He frequently uses isometric projection, or even flat-on 2D. His panels are rigidly, confiningly regular: squares or rectangles, boxing in his tiny characters and their tiny problems.

Human figures are drawn with extreme economy  always on the verge of being potato-heads with dots for eyes. Yet through this almost diagrammatic style, he manages to achieve something like documentary realism: he captures the exact way a cat curls up on a bed, or arches its back when it hears a tin of tuna being opened on the countertop; the exact way that a toddler will climb up and out of its high-chair; the weight in people's bodies and how they carry it. An overweight woman pushing a baby buggy says "huf"; a cat about to be sick says: "gkq". These panels are crammed with everyday truth.

It is a cliché  and a slight inanity, come to that  to say of a comics writer that he extends the possibilities of the medium. But you find yourself wanting to say something close to it about Ware: he is so attuned to the possibilities of the medium, so completely in control of what he's doing, that he finds expressive potential in it that you simply couldn't have anticipated.

Think how much harder it would be to capture in prose  without bringing it too pointedly into the foreground  the pervasive presence of smartphones and tablet computers, for instance. Yet here they are everywhere: distracting, absorbing, disconnecting. Husband and wife sit across from each-other at the table, each on their own laptop.

One panel  which could stand for many more  shows Ware's heroine standing naked beside the bed, arms by her sides, her underwear pooled on the floor beside her, as if offering herself. She looks on the verge of tears and her eyes are fixed dead ahead. On his back on the bed, naked, genitals flaccid against one thigh, her husband is reading an iPad propped on his sternum, the glow painting his chest and face. He shows no sign of having noticed her at all.

"God!" (or, as it's more wearily rendered on the opening panel of one of the sections, "god ...") sounds quietly through these stories. It's always a stock syllable of exasperation or dismay, but the idea that it could also be an appeal, or a cry for help de profundis, just distantly ghosts its meaning.

Only in the tragicomic universe of Branford the bee can any sort of yearning for transcendence be expressed. He's forever being beaten up by the other bees, he loves his wife but can't stop fantasising about fertilising the queen, and when trapped in a windowpane or an old fizzy drink can undergoes a dark night of the soul. But for Branford, flowers are the "eyes of god"  and he babbles his idiot devotion. Some good it does him.

There's nobody else doing anything in this medium that remotely approaches Ware for originality, plangency, complexity and exactitude. Astonishment is an entirely appropriate response.

 Sam Leith's You Talkin' to Me? is published by Profile.