At the center of Rose Tremain's 2008 Orange Prize-winning novel, "The Road Home," is Lev, an eastern European migrant worker trying to forge a new life for himself in London. In a bid to improve his English, he tackles "Hamlet" — a bizarre choice but a useful trope for Tremain to explore her character's ever-present isolation and dislocation.

Tremain performs a similar trick in one of the standout stories in her new collection, "The American Lover." Her last tale, "21st-Century Juliet," cleverly updates Shakespeare's pair of star-cross'd lovers, with Juliet a spoiled London society girl and Roméo ("Pronounced Ro-may-o. As in Alfa."), a Moldavian immigrant. The tragicomic events unfold through her diary entries and come packed with witty allusions. The story's only downside is its brevity: Its 17 pages could easily have been 70.

Tremain's longer stories are her strongest. The title story introduces Beth, a 29-year-old author, who tells her family's Portuguese maid about the torrid affair she had in 1960s Paris. Beth fictionalized her experience in a novel that made her rich and famous, but she still smarts from heartache. "I did have a beautiful life," she says sadly. "It ended early, that's all."

Two of the other more substantial stories revolve around literary figures. In "The Housekeeper," a Mrs. Danowski enjoys an illicit sexual encounter with Daphne du Maurier — and is later appalled to find herself cast as Mrs. Danvers ("ugly and diseased with jealousy") in "Rebecca."

And in "The Jester of Astapovo," we travel back to 1910 and the stationmaster's cottage outside Moscow where Tolstoy stopped to die. Tremain has fun with her creative license. "When will it be over?" the stationmaster's wife asks, tired of waiting for the great writer to expire. "When he decides," her husband answers. "Writers make up their own endings."

Further comic flourishes fleck "A View of Lake Superior in the Fall." Who could resist reading on after this opening line: "Walter and Lena Parker were in their early seventies when they decided to run away from home." The elderly pair head North after having their fill of their selfish daughter and her gate-crashing houseguests. The move prompts initial doubts, but both soon realize that "Being pretend Canadian is perfectly OK."

“The American Lover,” by Rose Tremain

Some stories are rightly shorn of humor, such as "Lucy and Gaston," in which an English woman and a French man are united in grief for the loved ones they lost in World War II. When Tremain's characters aren't mourning the dead, they are pining for the return of old flames or yearning for ways of escape.

Only "Man in the Water" disappoints. It resounds with promising ideas — a widower struggling to raise his children, an aging suitor, an inconclusive drowning — but Tremain is unable to synthesize them into an interesting whole. Her other 12 tales, however, more than compensate with their impressive array of human emotions and narrative styles.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.