"In my perfect life," a voice sings over a car radio, before being whipped away by the wind, "I don't mind playing the fool."

Polly Samson's interlinked short stories capture the noisy rituals, petty foolishness and unspoken betrayals of middle-class life. Her meticulously composed tableaux radiate warmth: an elaborate birthday party, a family arranged around an open fire, a piano tuner transfixed by the sight of an unpierced earlobe "tender as a new broad bean".

Like babes in the wood, Samson's characters possess a blithe grace  their days filled with fresh flowers and cherubic children. And yet, amid the domestic harmony there are scenes of lewd horror, humiliation, tragedy and regret. In "Morganna", an abandoned wife stalks her husband and his lover until fate turns the tables, while in "Ivan Knows" a child looks on as an adored babysitter writhes athletically on the rug in front of the fire. Perfection  not always synonymous with happiness  comes at a cost.

Samson, the wife of Dave Gilmour and occasional Pink Floyd lyricist, is a deft writer, and each story adds depth and subtlety to those that precede it. Her prose is embroidered with symbols that knit her characters together: a dress one character wears to meet a lover is worn by another to visit a dying grandmother, while the rose of a daughter's much-loathed tattoo becomes the symbol of another mother's terrible genetic legacy to her child. There is something both tender and desolate about this slow accretion of talismans: like charms that have lost their power to save, they come stripped of the assurances and associations of their past lives  empty vessels that speak only to the reader of the ineluctable distances between the characters they touch.

"I'm constantly dyeing" one character remarks, innocently, but her words betray a sense of loss. It's through such ambiguities that Samson's characters are revealed  mutely, poignantly wanting.