The title story of Elizabeth McCracken's second collection of short fiction, Thunderstruck, concludes the book and begins with a disappearance. It's a distillation, a concentration of the themes that whip and wend through these extraordinary and resonant fictions. In this story, the absence is resolved within the first sentence: in the preceding eight stories, the missing are gone, and the left behind are left to cope in the aftermath.

It's common to praise stories as having the heft and weight of novels, as compressed and breathing worlds in miniature, but Thunderstruck works not only as a grouping of such stories, but as a convincing, compelling whole. There is only one inter-textual link between the nine stories, yet together they bring unexpected depths to McCracken's radiant prose and cast of lost, lonely souls.

But, as one would expect from the author of the superb novel The Giant's House, this is far from a bleak book. Jewelled and barbed with the beauty and brutality of real life, these are sentences of perfect weight and understanding. There are no fillers here, no stories that disappoint: the nine coalesce into something rare and understatedly breathtaking. Like the missing who haunt these stories, Thunderstruck is unforgettable.