The Whole Story And Other Stories doesn't feel like a prize-winner, but that's okay. It's a more relaxed, sunnier outing than the morbid Hotel World. Smith is in a playful mood, energetically experimenting with language and form.

Her first story begins: 'There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. Well, no, okay, it wasn't always a man; in this particular case it was a woman. There was a woman dwelt by a churchyard. Though, to be honest, nobody really uses that word nowadays. Everybody says cemetery. And nobody says dwelt anymore.'

She goes on to spin a bizarre tale that jumps from the churchyard to a woman who owns a bookshop, to a copy of The Great Gatsby in the window of the shop, to a fly laying an egg on the cover of the book ('She was sponging with her proboscis the picture of the actors Robert Redford and Mia Farrow on the cover of the Penguin 1974 edition.'), to a man who bought it, to give to a woman, who made boats out of things that boats aren't usually made of, who used it to build a boat.

My favourite from this collection is set in a fast-food restaurant at a shopping centre on the outskirts of the Scottish town Inverness. Heroine Kimberley McKinlay is the feisty nightshift manager, and she runs a tight ship - there's absolutely no spitting on the grillplate, or any other kind of kitchen shenanigans, when it's her shift. Kimberley's true colours shine through when three men try to hold up the restaurant with gardening shears, a saw and a leaf-blower. She not only thwarts the robbery but sells the robbers burgers and fries and protects them from the security guard.

Other stories concern themselves with such unlikely events as a man who urinates in bookstores, an encounter with Death at King's Cross station, a colony of ants climbing a tree, a woman who buys socks in a supermarket in the middle of the night, a woman who is haunted by a Scottish pipe band, and another one who falls in love with a tree: 'I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn't not. It was in blossom.'

The 12 stories are tied together by being set over the months of a year, but that's about as structured as it gets. If there's a theme to the collection it's that the truth lies in random details as much as in major events. The whole story of life is too big and complicated to fit into a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Smith abandons the form and goes for skewed stories that don't tie up loose ends but leave doors open for whatever might come next.

This is an ambitious book, and it feels like it's been written with such care that every word demands attention. But it's not a difficult read. In another writer's hands this much experimentation could have been self-indulgent or solipsistic, but Smith never loses her sense of humour, and that's what enables her to charm as well as impress.