After a couple of weeks reading Eley Williams’s Attrib. and other stories, I’m now fascinated by the world behind the stories. I’ve become inordinately curious about the narrator, as well as the “you” who appears as a love interest in many of the stories; is it one person, or several? Do these fictional creations have real-life counterparts? How would they feel about being discussed so intensely? And the story about working on incidental sounds for a museum audio guide, is that based on firsthand experience? And when one of the narrators revealed that she (or he?) works in a museum, I immediately wondered if it was another clue about the author’s own experiences. How much of this is fiction?

It isn’t new to have such questions about a book, but the stories in Attrib. feel so intimate and real that it’s impossible not to be curious about where they come from. When I read the story where the narrator explains her symptoms as a synaesthete, my immediate question was how an author who lived with so many intense and random sensations managed to cope with the world? In a story called Smote, there’s an account of an intense viewing of a warped checkerboard painting by Bridget Riley. Didn’t standing in front of that (and also trying to kiss someone at the same time) cause all kinds of sensory problems? It was only when I began to rationalise rather than follow along in the emotional drag of the synaesthesia story that I realised that the author of the book might not have the condition at all. (Although I was so caught up in it all that I still had to check.)

Last week, I wrote about some of the intellectual games in Attrib., with the cleverness of it being the first thing people respond to in reviews. It’s certainly a big part of the book’s appeal. But now I’ve finished the collection, it’s the emotional resonance and vivid descriptions that impress me. This feels like a book that says something about how it feels to be a human, among the uncertainties of the 21st century. Williams’s characters are educated, informed and appear to be employed – but they are rarely certain of their place in the world.

A story called Mischief makes these worries most explicit, featuring a description of a character who detects landmines with the help of trained rats. Plenty of the other stories also seem to teeter on the edge of catastrophe: there’s a whale on a beach that may soon explode, an urge to kiss someone that might go horribly wrong, a phone conversation abruptly terminated. These are stories racked by insecurity and a feeling of imminent – not quite of doom, but certainly of things going wrong. When you add in the humour in these stories, and their moments of joy and delight, you sometimes get the exhilarating feeling of dancing on the edge of a cliff.

But there’s also apprehension. Lovers are always leaving. As soon as we’re told about a hedgehog swimming in a pool, we start to worry. Not even Michelangelo escapes: “I read in my research notes that Michelangelo once made a snowman. He sculpted it in a Florence courtyard for one of the Medici. Blank-faced and temporary, it must have melted into priceless gutters.”

Which brings me back to cleverness. All the wordplay and the questioning of the nature of language also help build a sense that nothing is to be relied upon. We are reminded that words can deceive – and so again, the fictional world shades into ours. Attrib. is rarely overtly political, certainly never gauche, but it feels like a book for right now.

Or at least, it did to me. I felt as if I was reading about my world. My curiosity about the narrator of these stories could just be solipsism. Writing in the New Humanist, Anna Aslanyan said: “The possibilities these stories imply are many, one of them being that you, the reader, could be their unnamed narrator. That’s why, like all good literature, they feel so personal, immediate and incredibly urgent.”

I agree. I’d also say that one of the achievements of the best stories in Attrib. is to make you feel as if you’re taking part in them, even if they don’t directly reflect your experience. I’ve never tried to kiss anyone in front of a Bridget Riley painting or tried to defuse a landmine, but this book has given me an impression of what those things might feel like. It’s opened up new worlds, even as it has reinforced a few ideas about my own.

• Attrib. and other stories by Eley Williams (Influx Press, £9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.