People often think those of us who read for a living spend all day lying on the sofa, slowly turning pages and eating our way through a box of Turkish delight.

Which some of us do, some of the time. Even when a book is banal, or dull, or not as good as it could be, it is still a pleasure, not a chore, and it is hard to disagree when a civil engineer, say, or an investment banker raises an eyebrow as if to ask, how can this be considered work?

It is rare, though, to find a book that makes you sit up and put aside sugary things. For comfort I often turn to Richard Ford, and his latest work, Let Me Be Frank With You, has been my bedtime reading this past week, a reason to close the curtains and turn off the phone earlier than usual. With Ford, the enjoyment lies above all in his tone, in the voice of his narrator Frank Bascombe, who feels like a companion, not a character.

The other day, however, I picked up a collection of short stories by a Colombian writer, Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Titled The All Saints' Day Lovers (Bloomsbury, £16.99), its opening couple of pages were a little confusing, perhaps because I was distracted but more likely - as I came to realise - because Vasquez pitches his readers headfirst into his stories. A day later I began again, and this time I fell under his spell. There is no better word because the effect he manages to create, and the world that he evokes, feels little short of spellbinding.

Most of these stories are set in Belgium or France. They take place in the present day, or at least they do so on the surface. Beneath stories of adultery, abandonment and even murder, the past takes up as much space as the present, an almost tangible presence between, for instance, a couple where the wife nearly ran off with another man, but decided to stay. Only decades later does that story come full circle, with almost Shakespearean force.

I've recently been involved in judging a short story competition - of which more another day - so the ingredients of what make a short story work have been much on my mind. The Richard Ford collection is not strictly a series of short stories so much as self-contained but interlinked chapters, a novel without the full scope or mechanics of a novel's underpinning, though no less engrossing for that.

Many of the attributes that make Vasquez stand out as remarkable he shares with Ford, though in an entirely different key. The most immediately obvious are the confidence and sure-footedness of his style, and the way each story reads as if you are only just catching onto the coattails of a story that has been running for a long time before it came to your attention. As a result, when the story finishes you feel it will continue, out of sight. Even though the words have ended, these lives and their reverberations have not.

But much of the power of these tales comes also from their setting. Most take place in a netherworld of rural Belgium, where men go hunting, and animals die violently - as can people - and where the forest undergrowth, and isolated habitations, feel like a metaphor for the impenetrable, unreachable psyches and passions and hurtful desires of his complicated, free-willed characters.

What marks out this collection is not merely the maturity of Vasquez's insights and his ability to look at people more closely than they have ever looked at themselves, but the shaping force of his literary personality, which lies upon them all. He has a signature as bold and distinctive as a painter's, and once you have read one, you feel you would know his writing anywhere.

Next week I go on holiday and Vasquez's novel, The Sound Of Things Falling, will be going with me. To be honest, I'm hoping for rain.