Taking Pictures, a short-story collection no doubt put together to capitalise on Anne Enright's Man Booker prize win, unearths the inner lives of women (only one of the stories has a male central character). There are unhinged students, wry old ladies and disgruntled wives, but best of all are the mothers - pregnant, lactating, discombobulated, resentful or craven with exhaustion.

Women's inner lives have, of course, been thoroughly mined by short-story writers such as Alice Munro or Helen Simpson. However, Enright opens up some genuinely interesting dimensions here. She brings to life unspoken internal worlds - the ebb and flow of gut emotions (some of which are taboo) - and gives shape to life's complexities. Cancer, in Honey, is a swarm of bees “being smoked out... a drowsy mass”. In Yesterday's Weather, a deranged new mother feels the pressure of maternal responsibility as if the baby is still inside her, “pushing up against her lungs, making everything tight”.

Enright's characters are a fairly miserable bunch, dogged by guilt or lost possibilities, mildly outraged by life. Many feel betrayed or disappointed - frequently by their menfolk (there are many flaccid penises and much disconnected sex in this collection). One wife overlooks her husband's infidelity until one of his mistresses dies in a car crash. Another marries sensibly, but hankers after her mad former housemate. Families are troublesome, marriages flawed, and friendship can feel downright perilous.

Some of these stories will leave a lasting impression. In Caravan, Michelle is on a camping holiday in France with her husband and two small children. A ghost keeps popping up at quiet moments, and there is “some other wreckage in her that Michelle did not yet recognise”. This is a manifestation of what is happening to Michelle, as she loses her identity to the hand-washing and scrubbing and the sheer overwhelming anxiety of child-rearing. It is a feeling that most mothers will recognise, brought arrestingly to life in this wordless apparition.

Enright's writing is sensuous and fluid, and this is a significant part of her appeal. In The Bed Department, a “forty plus” woman spends her days watching the elevators in the department store where she works, “the up escalator always mounting itself, step over step, the down escalator falling like syrup”. Occasionally, some stories feel a little rambling, but this subtle, reflective poetry usually compensates. Enright does not, thank goodness, take herself too seriously either - there is much wit and levity here: “They were nice boys,” muses the mattress seller. “They did not expect their mother to seduce old geezers in the front room, and neither did the old geezer.”

Sophie Hannah (best known as a poet and crime-fiction writer) also writes wittily in her collection, The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets. These stories tend to involve more out-and-out lunatics - unhinged and often inadvertently funny individuals who look at the world wild-eyed and askew. One character, a man stuck in a dull corporate job, who sends ill-advisedly sardonic e-mails to his new boss, “had never actively decided on the policy of saying the opposite of what he meant, it was simply what happened every time he opened his mouth”.

The pieces can be compelling. There is often a mystery, or some source of psychological suspense or menace at their heart,and it is easy to gallop from one to the next. However, when read in this way, a sense of déjà vu creeps in about three-quarters of the way through the book. It begins to feel as if there are too many spurned lovers driven crazy by their own pain; too many offbeat loners who do not quite comprehend the world around them. Perhaps this collection could have been rejigged to avoid such pitfalls. Still, one or two of these stories, such as The Nursery Bear, in which a neighbourly misunderstanding unearths potentially unpalatable truths about the past, are genuinely impressive and subtle, and overall Hannah's snappy style, along with her oddball personae, make this an engaging collection.

Taking Pictures by Anne Enright
Cape £12.99 pp227

The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah
Sort Of £7.99 pp272

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