I cannot remember the last time a book of short stories left me so fizzing with admiration. Atkinson tap-dances her way across the page, her prose as playful as a puppy, full of wit and invention, packed with pathos and pop culture. I can think of very few writers who can make the ordinary (Buffy, Barbie, a tenement flat) collide with the extraordinary (cats as big as tigers, children conceived at the bottom of the sea) to such beguiling effect.

I sing of Artemis, whose shafts are of gold... the pure maiden shooter of stags, who delights in archery . That's a Homeric hymn, quoted by Kate Atkinson to illustrate a literary point. I will sing of Atkinson, whose arrows are as bright: barbed, piercing and precise, fired with analogous delight.

In this themed collection, Atkinson has chosen to be a playful as well as erudite goddess of the pen. Her tales are largely set in modern Scotland, but she compels the reader to adopt the awed perspective of an ancient Greek. Real life trundles on, but only look twice and you can see the fingerprints of the gods plastered over every "accident" of fate (and we're not talking here about the avuncular Christian type of god but about lustful, arrogant immortals who love to play with mortal lives and spray their seed in human wombs).

All of these stories show myth and reality bulging into each other, the solid modern wall between them replaced by a ragged curtain of damp Scottish mist.