In her ambitious and assured fictional debut, Kuwaiti author Mai Al-Nakib ranges across the troubled last 60 years of her country in particular, and of the Middle East more generally. The Hidden Light of Objects contains 10 densely wrought stories, interleaved with vignettes. They are the work of a woman who was born in Kuwait in 1970; took a PhD in the United States and then returned to teach postcolonial studies and comparative literature at Kuwait University. There is not a sniff of Creative Writing in either her academic background or in her writing. What we have instead is a notably varied set of pieces of short fiction, often with riddling and enticing titles –  Chinese Apples, Echo Twins, Elephant Stamp, Amerika's Box. Yet they are united by a melancholy tone that infuses tales of loss of hope, land, life – and of the partial consolation that their telling and collection can bring.

The narrator of the first story, Chinese Apples, recollects the six weeks that she spent in Japan with her family at the age of 10, "away from my desert home". This was 20 years ago. Avidly she collected "story objects", things odd and mundane that would prompt her imagination. It was also a time that she cannot but regard as a more innocent one. This was before "the war that would save some of us"; "those were the days before smart bombs targeted children's heads, before oil was exchanged for lung cancer". Behind the personal lives of Al-Nakib's characters is another chronology, a political and economic one that dates back to the discovery of oil in Kuwait in 1946. In consequence, "the mad fantasy of riches would come, but it would come in a wave of seismic destruction". We hear, as well, of the beginning of the Civil War in Lebanon (when one character feels "the revenge of time snapping at his country's heels", the Intifada in Palestine, the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Some of the figures in these stories vainly seek to flee "the rusty ache of religion and politics", "approaching catastrophes swirling like smoke in the air across the Middle East". A young airline pilot leaves Beirut for Kuwait, only to find that his father – who had stayed behind – sacrifices himself to try to requite "the blackest stain", that is, the slaughter of thousands of Lebanese Shiite civilians by Christian militia in the camps at Sabra and Shatila. A woman, now "the saddest … in the world", had once dreamed of escape by marrying a Greek doctor: "she wanted out of the trap of Kuwait, the burdens of its rights and wrongs". The child who is rechristened (and misspelled) Amerika by parents who wish to express their gratitude for the US invasion find that they have willed a terrible fate upon the girl. Al-Nakib, for her part, and with whatever ambivalence, has come home.

One of the striking stylistic features of The Hidden Light of Objects is the weight of sadness that Al-Nakib can impart in simple sentences: "maybe once every couple of generations luck becomes a curse". Or this, of parents, "most cannot fathom that their children's yet-to-comes will never be theirs". Another distinctive quality of the prose is the brilliant attack with which some of the stories begin: "Japan is marvellous when you're ten", "Mama Hayet stopped breathing in the early evening", "Death is not what they promised", "Adam's father, they were told, vanished without a trace", "Charlie isn't happy with the shape his end is taking". Al-Nakib's writing is both disciplined and daring. The material of her stories is strange and compellingly familiar. A novel is promised next from an author who took her time to make such a significant mark with this first collection.