The sites of Judith Hermann's inquisition into loss are temporary ones: a pair of out-of-season holiday lets in Zweibrücken; a lent estate house in Tuscany; a quiet hotel in Berlin. The stuff of the world is intensely observed, but only possessed for the time being, with the exchange of money for days, and rooms. Only towards the end does a more permanent home for grief emerge, with the sense that our social bonds are as easily shed, and entered into, as the walls about us.

Over the last 40 years, novelists have begun to explore ways in which the old formal bonds may be shed, too. The old formal constraints, in which all the characters somehow know each other and in which their motives lead to some kind of mutual solution have started to seem unnecessary. After VS Naipaul's magisterial In a Free State (1971), all sorts of parallel narratives, thematically collected stories, "linked collections" of short stories and other still more unexpected intermediate forms have emerged.

Judith Hermann's Alice uses a particular situation as a linking device. Her central character, Alice, is only very lightly delineated, and is treated rather as an opportunity to observe a sequence of five bereavements and loss. In most of these, Alice's connection to the dying person is left unexplored, or only suggested. She has long ago had a relationship with Misha, dying in Zweibrücken, and is now shepherding his wife and child; she has been invited by Conrad and his wife to holiday in Italy, but she evidently doesn't know them very well, and her chosen guests, Anna and "the Romanian" have never met them when Conrad is taken suddenly ill. Richard is another friend, apparently, in Berlin, whose death is anticipated and indeed planned for in detail.

In these first three episodes, the focus, richly and indeed ecstatically observed, is on the facts of the world. Hermann's style, though highly restrained, is the opposite of affectless; rather, it is all affect, even when the human connections come second to the patient, insect-like observations.

In the last two episodes, Alice's connections to the dead become more solid; first, an inconclusive meeting with the lover of her gay uncle, who committed suicide 40 years ago, before Alice was born. And finally, the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, after which we understand, retrospectively, what the motive for her contemplation of previous intimate encounters with death might have been.

The question of loss and bereavement in a novel is an interesting one; in a sense there is no absence, no negation in literature. A poet who writes of the "huge and birdless silence" instantly evokes a crowd of birds. And Alice's dead husband Raymond exists in two, immense, mirroring versions: one the live one, observed with wonderfully physical, minute particularity as "a mosquito settled on his left shoulder, pushed its proboscis under his skin and pumped with the hind part of its body, calmly and for a long time".

Secondly, after his death, he exists as a collocation of exactly described lingering physical smells, of properties left behind, of memories, of phantom resemblances  and, most painfully, in the sentences that must be spoken to people who don't know of his death. In that second, purely linguistic embodiment of Raymond, there is a kind of novelistic redemption. He is only there in the words: but then, all of them are only there in the words. In choosing loss and absence as the unifying factor to draw a life together, Hermann has chosen well; she has settled on something very near the centre of the novelist's art.

Judith Hermann's reputation in Germany has been high since her impressive debut, the collection of short stories Sommerhaus, Später. This is a still more impressive book. It is distinctively new in form and manner, and yet distinctively German in the best, most romantically thoughtful way. Though her settings are of rented apartments, hospitals which no longer serve the modern-day needs of the survivors, and, distinctively, of the loneliness of post-wall Berlin, her spirit is solidly within the highest German traditions. It is not every novelist who could make something redemptive and humane out of five barely connected deathbed scenes. This is a triumph of the novelist's art.

Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers is published by Fourth Estate.