If Alain Tanner's haunting In the White City is one of the best Lisbon films, John Berger's equally evocative "Lisboa" is one of its truly great stories. On a hot day at the end of May in Lisbon, John - Berger, we are implicitly invited to assume, since another story in the collection features his daughter Katya - sees an old woman walking across the park towards him. He recognises her walk as that of his mother, who has been dead for 15 years. "The dead don't stay where they are buried," she advises him.

"Lisboa", the opening story in Berger's new collection, Here is Where We Meet , is a magical evocation of the White City, its seven hills, labyrinthine streets and endless steps. The trams pass so close to people's homes, he writes, that you could reach out an arm and give a birdcage a gentle push. "Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead," muses John, "perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city." But as the reader will discover, the dead show themselves off in many other locations, too - Krakow, Islington, Madrid. What's special about Lisbon, it's subtly suggested, are the trams. "It's not any place, John, it's a meeting place," his late mother tells him. "There aren't many cities left with trams, are there?" Berger then remembers the tram they took when he was a boy growing up in Croydon, the number 194. "We took it every day from East to South Croydon and back." The tram is more than a madeleine or a mnemonic; it's a spiritual medium.

In the collection's longest piece, "The Szum and the Ching", a river performs a similar function. Having travelled to a remote Polish village to open up a friend's house, John sits by the Szum river. He thinks of the River Ching, which ran at the bottom of the garden where he lived in the east London suburb of Highams Park until the age of six. "The Ching was my father's river." It eased memories of the trenches and brought son and father closer together, as John's father built a drawbridge for the boy. "When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own ..." By the Szum, John hears birdsong, yet there are no birds to be seen, as if the foliage itself is singing, an impression identical to one formed in Highams Park. "The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season." What in another writer's work might be the associative work of memory becomes, in Berger's fiction, virtual alchemy. "A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum."

"Islington", a tale of lost love, recovered memories and the end less flux of passing time and its effects on houses, gardens and people, appears in New Writing 13 and is by a long stretch the best piece in the anthology. Sad, reflective and peppered with unforgettable images, "Islington" does what all great short stories do: it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh. Makes us do a double-take. "Yet the density of the foliage was not like that of a jungle, but like the density of a closed book, which had to be read page by page."

A season of talks, exhibitions, readings and performances, bearing the same title as the collection, takes place in London from April 11 to May 18. It's hard to think of an author more deserving of this level of attention.

· Nicholas Royle's Antwerp is published by Serpent's Tail.