Rose Tremain's imagination makes you think of a trawlerman's net.

What she throws on the waters is returned teeming with life, from the sardine to the swordfish. In The American Lover, the characters she introduces could not be more diverse: the crippled best-selling novelist of the title story, whose heart was broken long before her legs; a beauty therapist inspired to run away to Paris; a mother fighting her qualms about sending her daughter to boarding school. These and all the rest of the work in this rich collection are one-offs, defying prediction. Although several are linked by the theme of lost love, something else also unites them.

In one of the most melancholic stories we meet an elderly man who every day tidies up his street, recycling its litter. Smithy, who was a tree planter by trade, recalls a photograph of himself as a child, standing alone on a beach holding a tiny Union Jack flag: "At the boy's feet was a sand castle, surrounded by a frail wall of shells. Beyond the limits of the picture, raged the cold North Sea."

A cold sea rages beyond most of these stories. Each is a capsule, sealed from the elements, but buffeted nevertheless. Smithy's fragile castle is apt not only for the loneliness he was to endure in life, but stands for many of the individuals here, who seek protection and security, but cannot save themselves from the waves.

The title story is, oddly, one of the least satisfying, an account of a young woman who writes a shockingly explicit novel about a love affair. Compared with others it is brittle, a little artificial, the woman's torment at her betrayal not entirely convincing.

By comparison, The Housekeeper is only too believable, even though its narrator is the model for Daphne Du Maurier's sinister Mrs Danvers: "Everybody believes that I am an invented person". In this shard of literary speculation - though for all I know it may be based in truth - the novelist embarks on a secret liaison with the housekeeper of a Cornish country house whose looks and manner are familiar to readers from her fictional counterpart. It is all too easy to imagine how this woman must have felt when she learns, long after their romance, that Du Maurier has trapped her in amber: not as the lover she believed herself to be, but as a monster of cold-heartedness.

A handful of the 13 tales stand out, and not just because of their greater length. There is a novelistic depth of atmosphere and meaning in the aforementioned Housekeeper, for instance, as in another inspired by a real writer. The Jester Of Astapovo is a sparkling evocation of Leo Tolstoy's final days, when he lay dying in a railwayman's cottage, taken ill when he was trying to escape his insufferable wife. The vignette is framed by another miserable marriage, that of the station master, whose wife thinks he is a fool. Thus, there are two sets of lives, the less significant framed by the famous, one within the other like Russian dolls.

A couple of period tales aside, it would seem Tremain is keen to remind us that while she may be acclaimed for her historical fiction, she is equally at ease with the modern world. She is not particularly unusual in this ability to change century as well as moods, but the elasticity of her interest, and the sharpness of her observation, is a reminder that good fiction requires fascination and an unblinking eye, as if each page or chapter were a painting. She is not unaware of this herself, clearly, the story Man In The Water being her imagining of the events behind the intriguing painting Yarmouth Beach And Jetty, by the 19th-century artist Joseph Stannard.

A View Of Lake Superior In The Fall could almost be called Hunters In The Snow, so redolent is it of Bruegel's icy woods, and the darkness that lies beyond the beauty. Set in the American wilds, it is the adventure of a retired couple who decide to escape their middle-aged daughter. They achieve this by staying at their summer log cabin through the winter, leaving her the run of their home in Nashville. Despite its seemingly domestic subject, the tone is tense from the start, and one soon learns why.

Even in Tremain's jeu d'esprit, 21st-century Juliet, she rises above the obvious. A pastiche of Shakespeare and Bridget Jones, it is the diary of a Wiltshire sloane who falls for a Moldavian builder rather than the millionaire toff her family needs her to marry. As her boss says, "Why don't you just marry that loaded throwback of yours, lambkin, and stop cluttering up the job market?" In the space of a few weeks our airhead storyteller learns more than she would like about the dangers of deception and desire and, frothy nonsense though it is, one is left fearing for her future.

Whatever Tremain's canvas, she has a knack of infecting the reader with her own absorption. The cumulative effect of The American Lover is thus deeply satisfying and unsettling. Many of its stories are unresolved, or tragic. Though she does not disdain plot and even drama, what matters is not what happens but the feelings she creates. Tremain's outlook is often dark, and she comes within a hair's breadth at times of cynicism. One of her most impressive talents, however, is to capture commonplace emotions as if they had never been felt before.