Bulgaria must be the EU country that impinges least on British consciousness. EU membership has probably added cheap package tours on the Black Sea to the other Bulgarian commonplaces of poisoned umbrellas on Waterloo bridge and endowing the English language with the word "bugger". In contrast the Romanians fare much better with their Dracula industry and a colourful uprising complete with dictator-shooting.

Very little Bulgarian literature has made it into English. I enjoyed Georgi Markov's memoir exposing the venality and boorishness of Todor Zhivkov's regime (which was, along with his radio broadcasts, to cost Markov his life), and Atanas Slavov's novel With the Precision of Bats. There's also Kapka Kassabova's memoir, Street Without a Name, but since that was written in English it's slightly cheating.

So I was rather looking forward to a bulletin from the frontline in Sofia, Deyan Enev's collection of short stories Circus Bulgaria. Born in 1960, Enev is old enough to have profound experiences of the old system, but has lived through 20 years of post-Soviet life. Originally published a few years ago in Bulgaria, the book's emphasis is on life after the changes, and how "democracy" (such as it is) and freedom don't equate to happiness and prosperity. The title story, "Circus Bulgaria" (a title open to all sorts of interpretations), sets the mood by relating how a desperate lion-tamer, down to his last lion, sells the beast so that both can survive the winter.

There are 50 stories in the collection, and many are so short they could easily fall into the category of flash fiction. Enev also has a taste for the mysterious or surreal ending, necessitating more than one reading to try to get a grip on the story (though, very often, rereading made the codas no clearer). Such oddities would be excellent for discussion in a reading group or a creative writing class, but I suspect that many readers will find several of these pieces too slippery for recreational purposes.

Take "The Return of the Prodigal Son". The narrator goes to visit his mother in hospital, then returns home, where he starts flicking through the family photo album. His brother, who has been away, walks in and announces he will be staying for a while. This is the last paragraph of the story: "In a few minutes, the room filled up with rats. They stood to attention, in thick tidy ranks, and their tails formed straight lines. Their lead eyes were fixed on my brother's. Their black bodies shivered. My brother said something incomprehensible and, screaming and squealing, the rats started jumping out of the window. When the last rat was gone, my brother rubbed his red eyes, sat on the bed and began to tell his story."

Several of the stories have these baffling endings, though there is at least one, "Rider Girl", which adheres to the classic Roald Dahl "twist in the tail" formula, and which will probably feature prominently in anthologies of erotic fiction.

Only one story really qualifies as a fully-fledged narrative, the closing piece "Over the Mountains", in which an English film-maker visits Bulgaria in order to investigate an appalling story of cruelty in the remote countryside, which turns out to be appalling in a completely different way (or not, depending on which of the characters you choose to believe).

Whether it's faithful to the original or not, I have no idea, but Kassabova's translation is so smooth and idiomatic that you have almost no sense of "otherness" (for example, a Bulgarian general talks about "cracking on" as if he'd been at Sandhurst). Can you translate too well?

Enev also has a strong lyrical streak, which the poet Kassabova renders beautifully: "Suddenly her face shrivelled up and darkened like burning paper." The overall tone of the collection, despite the general grimness of the panorama, is gentle and serene. You feel that Enev is a man at ease with hopelessness, who has made his accommodation with failure. I'd have weeded out some of the shorter pieces to make it tighter and less enigmatic, but there's no doubt Enev is a talented and entertaining writer.

Tibor Fischer's Good to Be God is published by Alma Books.

"There is no more circus art in Bulgaria, get this into your head," Pavarotti, a clown-turned-pub-owner, tells his hapless friend Pacho, a drunk lion-tamer, in the opening scene of Deyan Enev's Circus Bulgaria (Portobello £10.99). As the evening wears on Pacho is forced to agree, and eventually sells his beloved lion to a group of shady-looking men who arrive in a black Audi.

What follows is a vibrant collection of loosely related episodes that capture the essence of an impoverished, post-communist country. It's a world populated by shell-shocked soldiers prone to firing guns in brothels, of insane asylums where marriage ceremonies between inmates are conducted by tracing characters and words on to walls or windows; and where animals tend to be debased, betrayed or forgotten by their preoccupied owners. But running through all the grit, poverty and violence is a rich undercurrent of humour and compassion; and above all empathy for these characters and their yearning to fly "away to another country, where people are not afraid". Drawing heavily on Balkan folklore, Circus Bulgaria is both a vivid illustration of a broken society, and a triumphant escape from its confines.

The blurred boundaries between myth, magic and delusion also play a pivotal role in The Seas (Corsair £7.99). Samantha Hunt, an American writer whose short stories have already won wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, tells the tale of a 19-year-old girl who thinks she's a mermaid. The girl lives in a tiny, remote seaside town  somewhere with a fatally high rate of alcoholism and far enough north to have grim weather  and pines for Jude, an Iraq war veteran 13 years her senior. She loves him so much, she tells her doctor, that it's affecting her vision.

The girl has grown up as a social outcast, bullied at school, and now fills her days with stints of work as a chambermaid or occasional shifts in the local factory. She still lives in the old house in which she grew up with her mother, who waits for the husband who "disappeared" to the sea many years ago to return, and her grandfather, a typesetter who claims that he can remember a time before longitude and latitude. The story adopts some of the same contours as the 19th-century German fable of the mermaid Undine, but with modern twists involving prison, war trauma, car crashes and a near-death experience in a bathtub.

Hunt's prose is nimble and inventive, and she skilfully evokes both the emotional fragility of her subject and the wider uncertainties and dangers of the world around her. In places it's a gripping tale, but in others the vague motifs and overlaboured flights of fancy become unnecessary distractions. Overall, however, it's an enticing and intriguing read.

Anjali Joseph's Saraswati Park (Fourth Estate £12.99), meanwhile, is firmly focused on the quiet rhythms of ordinary life: specifically those of a middle-class family living in Mumbai. Mohan is a middle-aged letter writer who dreams of becoming an author; his wife Lakshmi is a kind, unassuming suburban housewife who enjoys watching soap operas and always makes sure guests are well fed, but who privately feels increasingly invisible.

With all their children grown up and living overseas, it's just the two of them until their nephew Ashish comes to stay while he repeats his final year at university. He flunked the year, it seems, because he fell hopelessly in lust with Sunder, a rich and glamorous classmate who would often get Ashish to do his homework for him. Lakshmi's brother recommends a tutor, Narayan, to help Ashish with his studies; but before long, Ashish has started an affair with his "professor".

It's an elegantly realised portrait of unrequited love, frustrated aspirations and the unspoken compromises of marriage and family. Joseph neatly weaves in elements of the rapid social change occurring in the ever-expanding city (where "Idiot Idiot" coffee chains have appeared in every new shopping mall) but her principal concern is the more complex process of personal change and development and its bittersweet effects: the nerves, hang-ups and pains of youth and the regrets, pleasures and fulfilment of old age.