It is hard to believe that this is Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of short stories. Written with an assured hand, the language and evocative imagery frequently reminded me of that other great short story writer - Anita Desai.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2000, Ms Lahiri's story 'The Interpreter of Maladies' is the best of the bunch. The tale explores the sharp contrast in Asians from America and those living in India. A young Asian couple and their children holidaying in India have a taxi tour-guide whose other job is as a translator of patient complaints to a doctor: a role that has evolved into interpretation these maladies. The result is sparkling insight into the workings of a seemingly cohesive Asian-American family unit. Jhumpa Lahiri has taken western culture and eastern roots and produced something quite honest, raw and beautiful. She manages to entwine the exoticism of the East into this story without cliché.

'When Mr Pirzada came to dine" and "Mrs Sen's" are both tales that are like Polaroid snapshots, capturing in soft focus the fleeting moments of life. The former explores the camaraderie that builds up between an Indian family and a Bangladeshi colleague, "all Asians together in America". This cosy relationship shattered by civil war in 1971. Separated (only by distance) from his wife and daughters, Mr Pirzada endlessly scrutinises TV coverage of the war. Replace this scenario with the Gulf War, Afghanistan or even the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, and it is easy to see that the same influences apply today.

Indeed "When Mr Pirzada came to dine" describes in detail the similarities between the people of South Asia - the language, the food, family and the sense of "one race". Ironically this is described through the eyes of a young girl, dislocated from any sense of her homeland whose time is spent "trick or treating" and making American friends.

"Mrs Sen's" is a more modern day viewpoint of childcare in the USA. The story is a young boy's description of his afternoon child carer, Mrs Sen, and her life as seen through his eyes - a combination of isolation, loneliness and homesickness, on that is echoed in the boy's own life. In the story, Mrs Sen's pursuit is a "whole fish" that she wants to procure for her husband and one that evocatively reminds her of home.

'The Treatment of Bibi Halder' is more colourful. It describes the life of an ill girl living in rural India who comes to believe that sex and marriage are a cure to her maladies. Her cousin places an advert reading "Girl. Unstable. 152 centimetres. Seeks Husband" in a local paper - a paragraph that not only made me laugh, but one that incisively captures the desperation, I thought.

Jhumpa Lahiri's versatility is truly remarkable. In the tale "This Blessed House" she recounts the story of two young Asians starting married life together in Connecticut, USA, who bizarrely keeping finding Christian iconography in their new home. Ms Lahiri's uses these icons to highlight the differing personas of each of her characters and elegantly weaves them back together again - all in a few short pages. Distinctly mismatched at the start, Sanjeev is the rather staid, boring engineer and his wife Twinkle a more artistic, open-minded individual. The reader gets an opportunity to glimpse not only the development of an Asian marriage, but also the "latter-day settler" mentality of American Asians. Will Sanjeev and Twinkle be able to make a go of their marriage, one wonders?

Ms Lahiri does not shy away from painful topics. In her tale "A Temporary Matter" we witness that unbearable grief of a miscarriage and the strain this puts on an otherwise good Asian Marriage. Jhumpa Lahiri's stories can be moulded like literary plasticine into whatever she wants them to be.

With this collection she has managed to bring South Asian literature into the mainstream.

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