In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing altogether with conventional punctuation, the book contained not a single comma or quotation mark, using instead ellipses. This was brilliantly imitative of both the clipped speech of its upper-class characters, particularly when facing disasters large and small, and the hell-for-leather pace of lives spent galloping on horseback across the Gloucestershire countryside.

Bursts of words tumble over each other as one idea interrupts or follows fast on another

Bingley’s new book is just as original, though far harder to categorise. Equally elliptical, it consists of 26 pieces, some of which may be further fragments of autobiography, while others seem like dashed-down diary entries, vivid pieces of reportage or oblique short stories. There are paragraph breaks, but no punctuation apart from full stops, and this gives the book a startling immediacy, a sense of catching life on the wing as it flashes past at terrifying speed. It also captures the way people speak, not in a novelist’s elegantly constructed sentences but in pell-mell bursts of words tumbling over each other as one idea interrupts or follows fast on another. In ‘A Fall’, two old friends are in a restaurant, where one complains that she cannot be late home because of her controlling husband:

I say kill him I’d’ve she says no you’d not I can’t go away leave him then send the children to be alone with him so I count time I see the swallows come and go and then it’s Christmas again I’ve got some stuff to help if the days get long I say let me see your arms no tracks at least she says remember the pigeons flying round and round above us as we lay in buttercups the stuff I take is like pigeons flying…

As with such writers as Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen, this kind of prose requires the reader’s concentration, which is richly repaid.

Some of the narratives similarly flit from what appears to be their main subject and setting into wholly different territory, one idea sparking another that may seem only tenuously related. ‘Mouthing’ starts out as a grimly funny and all too believable account of trying to get urgent dental treatment in London, then (via a memory of a broken collarbone in childhood) compares this unfavourably with veterinary practices in America, which gives rise to reminiscences about a pet dog the narrator had while working there for the Kennedy Institute, which brings to mind the occasion when the US Secretary of Defense was reduced to tears in London by students haranguing him about the Vietnam War. It ends with the narrator recalling how for a year in the States she smoked a pipe, and ends abruptly: ‘Then we go home to Ireland.’

A great deal is packed into just over six pages, and other short episodes are similarly dense with incident. ‘Down the Lane’ is a wonderfully detailed yet compact account of the narrator, accompanied by a different dog, driving to a country churchyard to bury her mother’s ashes. Her description of the journey, the service and walking the dog mingle with memories of her lost parent in a beautiful and fast-flowing stream of consciousness.

As well as being inventively and compellingly written, the book is often darkly funny, as in ‘Cigarettes’: ‘My small son implores me each night at bedtime please don’t kiss me you smell of tobacco and anyway I don’t want to get too fond of you because you’ll die of cancer soon.’ ‘Christmas in the Shires’ is an insider-outsider’s entertainingly bleak account of that festival, while ‘Vienna’ is a jaunty and superbly laconic black comedy about a femme fatale and her suitors. Elsewhere, Bingley is amusingly observant of men’s complacency and sense of entitlement. A woman, asked how she will make conversation when placed next to famous men at dinner parties, answers: ‘You say do tell me about yourself. He will.’

The settings of these pieces are hugely varied but Bingley brings a penetrating eye and sharp wit to their many different milieus, whether it a spell in hospital or mingling with the crowds at Princess Diana’s funeral. A piece about lives fuelled by addiction titled ‘The Punks Then’ ends: ‘Someone should write a social history of them. If I was young and clever I would.’ If it is not too ungallant to say so, Bingley may no longer be young, but she is undoubtedly clever, and in this marvellous book she has brought a lifetime’s observation and a true writer’s skill to do something far more interesting and rewarding.