This excellent miscellany of modern short fiction from Ireland begins and ends with a road accident. The first, which proves fortuitous, involves an out-of-work labourer and a carload of nuns; the second  which is fatal  occurs when a mechanic decides to earn a few extra euros ferrying tourists to a shrine where a statue of Mary is said to weep. Between these two tales we meet a mother who finds her son suspected of child abuse (Colm Tóibín's "A Priest in the Family"), and we glimpse the consequences of Irish abortion law through the eyes of a guileless emigrant who has a one-night stand with a fellow Dubliner in King's Cross.

Throughout, the prose is economical, in the sense of being deft, not sparse. We can scent the hinterland of thwarted aspiration when a nervy housewife in a Maeve Brennan piece accidentally breaks "two of the cups from the good set". In "Villa Marta", Clare Boylan nails the innocence and cynicism of two young women who meet a pair of sailors on holiday in Spain: "Rose thought it wouldn't matter much to Sally since Sally's period was late following some home-based encounter. She calculated some basis on which to make it worthwhile for herself." The men buy dinner, in other words. "The girls ate with the speed and concentration of thieving dogs."

The prevailing mode is an everyday realism of carefully observed gestures and lifelike dialogue, well adapted to the mental turmoil of lustful, lovelorn protagonists. Scenarios tend to be intimate rather than political, even if the distinction breaks down in Anne Devlin's tale of a Belfast bookseller who becomes the honey trap in an IRA revenge killing. One of the few writers to take risks with tone is Roddy Doyle, in "The Pram", a gothic chiller about a put-upon nanny from Poland.

Wisely, the stories are arranged imaginatively, not chronologically  think mix tape, not reference work  so, unlike many anthologies, this is a book you actually want to sit down with and read. But be warned that it presents a bleak picture: Irish horizons, particularly for women, look as narrow in the story by Joseph O'Connor (b. 1963) as they do in the one by Frank O'Connor (d. 1966); and if you had to pick one story to provide an overall title, it might be Hugo Hamilton's "The Supremacy of Grief". Just the thing for these dark nights.

As the title suggests, this collection attempts to define the essential Irish aspects of the stories chosen rather than pick a best-of from well-known writers. Of course, William Trevor is here; Frank O'Connor as well as Roddy Doyle. Naturally Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien and Clare Boylan make the cut. But, as Anne Enright says in her introduction, while most writers in every culture will use the short-story form, for many it functions merely as a sketch for a novel, and only some countries make the form their own. O'Connor suggests loneliness as an essential part of the make-up, and thus marginal or defeated cultures turn to short stories, while the confident nations have no trouble finding the heroes around which to build novels. So the pervading feeling of the selection is melancholy, and revelations turn on sadness, or at best small joys. It is a pity that the biographies and bibliographies come right at the end as the best pieces here serve as a prompt to find or rediscover the writers' other works. A book to dip into, then, rather than devour.