WHEN I telephone Akhil Sharma in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it is 9am. He is in the middle of a book tour and has just flown in from Jackson, Mississippi. I ask if I woke him up. “No,” he says, in a pleasant jovial way, “I was just sitting here looking at my phone, which most human beings seem to do every morning.” I try to think of other people who might have added that second, objectifying clause. A sociologist, perhaps?

Out of necessity, writers live at one remove from the world. It is the paradox that enables the good ones to create such immersive fictional worlds. The ability to make the daily or mundane strange is a quality of Sharma’s bracing and comic first collection of short stories, A Life Of Adventure And Delight. In Cosmopolitan, for example, Gopal Maurya finds himself un-homed in his own home. His wife has left him to seek enlightenment in India. Gopal has struggled to “truly Americanise”. It shows when he initiates a strange romance with his neighbour, Mrs Shaw: “Because Mrs Shaw was an American, Gopal thought, he needed to do research into what might be expected of him.” He follows the advice in Cosmopolitan magazine about “what makes a good lover”. It doesn’t end well.

Sharma’s stories are full of odd humour. In The Well, the protagonist’s father steals some fresh rectangles of turf from a neighbour’s garden. “My mother came running out of the house and stood by the driver’s side door. ‘If you are going to steal, don’t steal during the day,’ she screamed. ‘Do you know nothing?’”

In the American stories, the Indian characters strive to retain their traditions while embracing American life. The other stories are set in a chaotic, monsoon-soaked and colourful India where religion and personal unease are shored up against one another. Wherever they are, however, Sharma’s protagonists always seem uncomfortable in their surroundings.

Sharma himself is no stranger to that feeling. He was born in Delhi in 1971, but in 1979 his family emigrated to New York, where he still lives, in an apartment on the Upper West Side. His father worked as a clerk for the government and his mother was a housewife. Before leaving India he had few preconceptions about America, although he thought “the sidewalks moved, like you have in airports”. When he arrived, it was a difficult transition.

“I became very quiet. I basically stopped talking for about two and a half years. I remember how anxious I was about being in a new place. I began reading books obsessively out of a need to escape my life. My preference was for fairy tales, but I read whatever was in front of me – Journal Of The Plague Year, The Old Man And The Sea, Robinson Crusoe, Pride And Prejudice.” His family had rented a room in his uncle’s apartment and Sharma found some of these books lying around. Others he found in a school catalogue. He bought a copy of David Copperfield because “it had the most pages and I was looking for a bargain … I remember finding David Copperfield intensely boring. The only line I remember is [Mr Micawber’s advice]: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.’ I think even as a child I had a certain panic regarding money.”

Sharma was precocious and his upbringing instilled in him a hard-headed pragmatism. He knew he wanted to be a writer but could not reconcile that life with paying the bills. His educational record glitters with credentials: Princeton, Stanford then Harvard Law School. He took writing classes alongside business courses, and worked as a banker for three years in his 20s. I point out that not many writers move from well-paid finance to low-paid word-craft. “I think you can exaggerate the importance of that,” he says. He also shrugs off the transition to becoming a full-time writer in the late 1990s. “People always ask about it, but it wasn’t a meaningful thing.”

His first novel, An Obedient Father, about a corrupt civil servant in India, was published in 2000, and won the Hemingway/Pen Foundation award. It took him nine years to write that, and 12 and a half years to write Family Life (2014), which won the Folio Prize.

The stories in A Life Of Adventure And Delight cover a 20-year period. Cosmopolitan was first published in The Atlantic in 1997. The Well was published last year in The Paris Review. “I just didn’t know how to write those books [the novels],” he says. “My hope is that the next book will be a little bit faster. At one point, my British editor said he was expecting to retire by the time my third book showed up, and he’s my age.”

Once you’ve interviewed a certain number of writers, you get a sense of those who know what they’re doing and those who don’t. Sharma might doubt his own aptitude, but that is probably more to do with humility than reality. My suspicion that he knows more than he thinks is proven correct when we get down to the fine detail. I tell him that, for stories written over such a long time, the style seems remarkably assured. Did he rewrite any for the book?

“There was one story – A Heart Is Such A Heavy Thing – where I changed a few sentences … I think the style changes quite dramatically. For example, Cosmopolitan is so plotted, the paragraph transitions are so tight. Whereas the transitions in The Well are much looser.”

His writing style is minimalist and precise, almost analytical, and occasionally punctuated by brief moments of revelation. “I often find language a distraction from life. I’m trying to find a way for language and life to walk side-by-side, but sometimes life is so glorious that you need language to hurry up. For example, if you look at You Are Happy?, the language heightens only when there are liminal states. When Lakshman walks into his mother’s room [where she is in a drunken stupor], he says the light seems ‘inhuman, as if they were above the clouds’. At that point life is so intense that ordinary language is insufficient.”

Another story, Surrounded By Sleep, will be familiar to readers of Family Life. It describes a young boy called Ajay, whose talented older brother, Birju, dives into a swimming pool and cracks his head on the bottom, leaving him brain-damaged for life. It is a fictional retelling of what happened to Sharma’s own brother not long after he moved to America. The story, down to the very sentences, is so like the novel it raises the question of how the two forms approach the tragedy differently. “Surrounded By Sleep was written a long time before I wrote the novel, so that [story] became the novel. That’s why it feels so self-contained. That story is largely about the character striving for meaning, striving to understand what has happened. Whereas Family Life is a coming-of-age sort of thing. Certain features are foreclosed in the short story. The character is brain-dead instead of brain-damaged. The weaknesses of the father are hidden.”

Family Life might be a good title for Sharma’s short stories as well. Many of them explore how families endure under the judgemental eyes of the community. In You Are Happy?, the alcoholic mother is sent back to her parents for fear of the shame she will bring on her husband’s family.

The transactional nature of Indian marriage is fruitful territory for a writer: “You know, in India most families have arranged marriages. The issue is that if you have an arranged marriage, there isn’t much data available about the person you are marrying. If there is any sort of stigma it will affect everybody’s chances of getting married. If one person is an alcoholic, people start to think the whole family is crazy.”

Stories like You Are Happy? carry real emotional punch, but they are undercut with farce and a fine wit. This subtle approach comes across in Sharma’s sometimes oblique way of answering questions. Near the end of our conversation, I ask him about a line in the title story: “To be able to be kind to someone you loved seemed a fortunate thing.”

Surely kindness is a result of character, not fortune? “You know,” he says, “[Samuel] Johnson was very depressed after his wife died. His friends took him to Pairs and they were walking along the Seine, past the palaces. His friend said, ‘Sir, what do you think of Paris?’ Johnson said, ‘Having no-one to please, nothing pleases me.’”

It is telling that Akhil Sharma is drawn to this melancholy yet playful anecdote. Too many writers let a simple-minded, tragic tone dominate their books. Sharma’s stories are too clever for that. In their own subtle and emotionally complex way, they capture the sad comedy of ordinary life.

A Life Of Adventure And Delight, by Akhil Sharma, Faber & Faber, £12.99. Sharma is appearing at the EIBF on August 22 www.edbookfest.co.uk