Stuart Evers's debut collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, contained  with all due apologies to residents of Wiltshire  a damning appraisal of the traveller's despair on arrival into Swindon. "Swindon looked like a business park that had got out of hand. There was an eerie, almost American sadness about it."

There was an eerie, almost American sadness to all the stories, whether set in Evers's native north-west of England or the seamy gambling strips of Reno and Vegas. The stark minimalism of the prose suggested that Evers has made a close reading of American masters of short fiction such as John Cheever and Raymond Carver. But above all the collection seemed to be under the melancholic influence Richard Yates (even the title appeared to be a nod towards Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness).

Richard Russo characterised Yates's oeuvre as "the tragedy of small dreams left unfulfilled"; and small, unfulfilled dreams are the foundation on which Evers's first full-length work of fiction is based. The narrator, Joe Novak, is a young drifter with a residual north-of-England accent recently arrived in New York. Here he meets O'Neil, an ambitious property salesman, who takes him under his wing. "'You know your problem, Joe?' O'Neil said. 'You don't dream the big dreams. Your dreams are small. Pygmy dreams. Old-fashioned dreams  Worst thing in the world is small dreams not coming true.'"

Joe accompanies O'Neil to Las Vegas and a new life selling real estate in an enigmatic development named the Valhalla. It purports to be a place where senators and movie actors can mingle unaccosted in the casinos, massage parlours and bizarrely themed restaurants, where the food is served in pitch darkness  though it is later revealed that most of the celebrity clientele are lookalikes employed to entice high rollers into signing on the dotted line.

Neither is Joe Novak quite what he seems. Prior to arriving in America, he was plain Mark Wilkinson, from a small town in Cheshire, whose single ambition in life was to see the sights of New York with his girlfriend, Bethany. They never made it together: to reveal why would be to ruin the suspense of Evers's careful plotting. But it compels Joe/Mark to return to his birthplace and confront some unanswered questions about his past. Here, the contrast with Las Vegas could hardly be greater. The one bright spot is Ferne, an attractive young professional holed up in the same mediocre hotel, who begins to suspect that Joe is not quite such a stranger to the area as he pretends to be.

Evers makes a dramatic virtue of this sense of deja vu, yet the reader still experiences a nagging feeling that we have been somewhere very like this before. Among the Ten Stories About Smoking was a tale entitled "The Best Place in Town", in which a young man from the north-west of England finds himself in an enigmatic Las Vegas casino that does not appear in any guide books or maps. He encounters an embittered variety performer who once worked as a warm-up act for the magician Paul Daniels and expressed mystification as to why "a short, ugly dud like him managed to get a prime-time television show, a sexy blonde and a two-hundred date world tour". Daniels's reply was: "I don't know  But I do know that you only get one talent. So you best make the most of it while you can."

It's a wonderful story, in which the mystique of Las Vegas and the mundanity of Paul Daniels collide in a fashion that Evers has made exclusively his own. But though the concept of a mysterious casino feels credible within the context of a short story, as the basis for a novel it feels somewhat overstretched. The Valhalla  "a place where dreams really could become reality"  feels more than a little unreal. If This Is Home confirms Evers as a distinctive talent, yet also shows evidence of a Paul Daniels-like willingness to repeat the same trick. You'll like it. Not a lot  but you'll like it.

Stuart Evers's debut collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, contained  with all due apologies to residents of Wiltshire  a damning appraisal of the traveller's despair on arrival into Swindon. "Swindon looked like a business park that had got out of hand. There was an eerie, almost American sadness about it."

There was an eerie, almost American sadness to all the stories, whether set in Evers's native north-west of England or the seamy gambling strips of Reno and Vegas. The stark minimalism of the prose suggested that Evers has made a close reading of American masters of short fiction such as John Cheever and Raymond Carver. But above all the collection seemed to be under the melancholic influence Richard Yates (even the title appeared to be a nod towards Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness).

Richard Russo characterised Yates's oeuvre as "the tragedy of small dreams left unfulfilled"; and small, unfulfilled dreams are the foundation on which Evers's first full-length work of fiction is based. The narrator, Joe Novak, is a young drifter with a residual north-of-England accent recently arrived in New York. Here he meets O'Neil, an ambitious property salesman, who takes him under his wing. "'You know your problem, Joe?' O'Neil said. 'You don't dream the big dreams. Your dreams are small. Pygmy dreams. Old-fashioned dreams  Worst thing in the world is small dreams not coming true.'"

Joe accompanies O'Neil to Las Vegas and a new life selling real estate in an enigmatic development named the Valhalla. It purports to be a place where senators and movie actors can mingle unaccosted in the casinos, massage parlours and bizarrely themed restaurants, where the food is served in pitch darkness  though it is later revealed that most of the celebrity clientele are lookalikes employed to entice high rollers into signing on the dotted line.

Neither is Joe Novak quite what he seems. Prior to arriving in America, he was plain Mark Wilkinson, from a small town in Cheshire, whose single ambition in life was to see the sights of New York with his girlfriend, Bethany. They never made it together: to reveal why would be to ruin the suspense of Evers's careful plotting. But it compels Joe/Mark to return to his birthplace and confront some unanswered questions about his past. Here, the contrast with Las Vegas could hardly be greater. The one bright spot is Ferne, an attractive young professional holed up in the same mediocre hotel, who begins to suspect that Joe is not quite such a stranger to the area as he pretends to be.

Evers makes a dramatic virtue of this sense of deja vu, yet the reader still experiences a nagging feeling that we have been somewhere very like this before. Among the Ten Stories About Smoking was a tale entitled "The Best Place in Town", in which a young man from the north-west of England finds himself in an enigmatic Las Vegas casino that does not appear in any guide books or maps. He encounters an embittered variety performer who once worked as a warm-up act for the magician Paul Daniels and expressed mystification as to why "a short, ugly dud like him managed to get a prime-time television show, a sexy blonde and a two-hundred date world tour". Daniels's reply was: "I don't know  But I do know that you only get one talent. So you best make the most of it while you can."

It's a wonderful story, in which the mystique of Las Vegas and the mundanity of Paul Daniels collide in a fashion that Evers has made exclusively his own. But though the concept of a mysterious casino feels credible within the context of a short story, as the basis for a novel it feels somewhat overstretched. The Valhalla  "a place where dreams really could become reality"  feels more than a little unreal. If This Is Home confirms Evers as a distinctive talent, yet also shows evidence of a Paul Daniels-like willingness to repeat the same trick. You'll like it. Not a lot  but you'll like it.

Escaping the humdrum provinces in search of bright lights and the big city isn't just the stuff of teenage dreams but, increasingly, a rite of passage. Stuart Evers's excellent, multilayered debut novel explores his characters' desperate need to flee a well-drawn northern town that is "the worst of all worlds  a penitentiary for those with a lack of imagination". When one boy, Mark Wilkinson, actually makes the break he not only heads for America  only to invent different personalities and back stories there. When he returns, images of his past, especially his goth-turned-carnival-queen girlfriend, haunt his every move. It's here that Evers's storytelling is at its most adept and inventive; the book shifts gear into a ghost story, a murder mystery and a voyage of self-discovery all in the space of a few pages, without ever resorting to melodrama or genre cliches.

In fact, the pervading air is one of quiet melancholy and disappointment. And yet, despite even his protagonist admitting to himself that he is "a slightly bored observer", it's to Evers's great credit that If This is Home is so readable. In the end, that's because Wilkinson is such a familiar character, someone who follows his dreams only to find that, regretfully, life doesn't quite turns out the way it does in the movies. A quiet triumph.