Not surprisingly, her second book has been much anticipated, and it does not disappoint. There's a sureness of touch, a breadth of vision and experience, and an extraordinary combination of technical sophistication with depth of feeling in all of these stories. Those things are rare by any standards, much less in the work of a writer still so young. Most of these stories are told by a first-person narrator with a limited point of view and a tenuous grip on events. Winch's control and management of these voices, with all their bewilderment and intensity of feeling, shapes them into richly suggestive stories in which the reader is pointed in various unspoken directions and not a word is wasted.

The short story is traditionally the preserve of private and inner life: its form is suited to the moment of epiphany, the mood of a day, the unravelling of a relationship, or the turning point in a life, moments at once significant and fleeting that form the nucleus of stories by such masters of the form as Chekhov and Mansfield. Winch's stories follow this pattern, of emotion intensely felt and moments where lives are changed forever, but behind these tales of individual lives the reader can always sense the politics of race, of class, of gender, and can sense behind those things the massive forces of history, ruthlessly shoving these characters around.

A widely travelled woman of Wiradjuri, Afghan, and English heritage, born in New South Wales and now living in Paris, Winch writes with apparent effortlessness as a citizen of the world. The narrators of these thirteen stories come from all around the globe, many of them willingly or unwillingly transported from somewhere else: a young American in Paris, a Muslim speaker of Arabic who has fled to France, an ambitious young Nigerian man struggling with life in New York, a Chinese-Australian woman trying to sell overpriced Australian university education in Guangzhou. At least half of these stories explore the uncertainties of international displacement and cultural unease.

Another common theme is the unreliability of romantic love and family ties: the pages of this book are littered with unhappy couples, with struggling parents, with drinkers, deadbeats, and deserters. There are couples who are wildly mismatched and others who habitually miss each other's mental track. But Winch's clear-eyed observations about intimate relationships are balanced by some positives, notably the supportive and comforting sibling relationships in 'Easter' and 'Failure to Thrive'.

Tara June WinchBeginnings and endings are the bane of a short story writer's – perhaps any writer's – existence, but Winch excels at both, and her gift for endings in particular is remarkable. The first story in the collection, 'Wager', begins with the comically surreal image of a grown son visiting his mother and trying to cope with his little half-brother's plastic horses in the bathtub. The story moves through its quiet realism with growing unease to end in a place that reminds the reader of Raymond Carver. So does the ending of 'Baby Island', in which the ageing and cynical narrator succumbs to a sudden moment of madness; and that of 'After the Carnage, More', in which the hospitalised victim of a bomb blast in Pakistan is left in suspense, desperate for news of his wife.

By contrast, 'The Last Class', one of the best and most haunting stories here, subverts its own awful message by ending on an upward swing with an unpredictable and unforgettable image, and the ending of 'The Proust Running Group of Paris' is likewise redemptive. Winch's beginnings can also be arresting in various ways, as in 'Meat House', which begins with another unforgettable image: 'In front of the Hagia Sophia the woman's skirt billowed, the pleats of houndstooth becoming a momentary jellyfish bell.' The strange, soft-focus, drifting story 'A Late Netting' begins 'If we had been drawn down a river, at least that knowing river would've taken us towards its mouth'. The opening sentence of 'Mosquito' is wryly riffing off Bruce Springsteen's classic 'The River', offering a female version: 'For my nineteenth birthday I got a single-parent pension card and a bassinet.'

'Mosquito' is a superb story, a terrifying tale of motherhood, fear, betrayal, and revelation; along with the complex and richly layered 'The Last Class', this is the high point of the book. Given the range and scope of this collection along with its technical excellence, it's hard to imagine where Winch, as a writer, might go next. What's clear is that she can go pretty much anywhere she wants.