THERE is a strong sense of déjà-lu about Kate Clanchy’s new collection of short stories. Many of them concern issues that she has explored in other forms. There are several stories, for instance, on the plight of Britain’s immigrants – her non-fiction book What Are You Doing Here centred on her relationship with a Kosovan war refugee who was in her domestic employment. Motherhood is another recurring theme, one Clanchy has repeatedly taken up in newspaper columns and in her 2004 poetry collection Newborn.

Unfortunately, several of the early stories in the book retreat to another place that Clanchy has been before. In a 2013 interview in a Scottish newspaper and a follow-up piece entitled “Why I am not Scottish (enough)”, she claimed that she was never fully accepted as a Scot during her childhood in Scotland, something she partially ascribed to her posh accent. Clanchy labelled the Scottish referendum “divisive” and wrote “how can you possibly fix a national identity, now?”

Strange then, that in the early stories in the collection, Scottish national identity – and English, for that matter – is not just fixed but stereotyped. In Irene, for instance, the female protagonist has a baby with her London musician boyfriend who still lives with his ex-wife. Retreating to Scotland, she is helped by “Aunt” Irene who comforts the child with misquoted excerpts from Ye Cannae Shove Yer Granny Off a Bus. When shove comes to push, the thoroughly unconvincing Irene dismisses modern things “in a phony English accent” even though she is carrying a couple of secrets of her own.

In The Invention of Scotland, an Edinburgh schoolgirl, one of several Fionas in the same class, meets Ophelia Blane-Huntingdon who arrives at the school from London. Ophelia is, of course, an exotic specimen who dares to go where the Scots girls won’t: questioning the teacher, criticising Lewis Grassic Gibbon, attracting males like flies. Ophelia’s mother Clarissa (names noted) is more of the same: “the first adult I ever called by her first name, or who wore jeans or who was divorced.” She is also a writer, although not a very good one. Clarissa is prone to speechifying about Scotland, invoking simplified versions of the “invented tradition” argument or dismissing it as a province rather than a country. Eventually the English mother-daughter combination collapses under the weight of its hidden weaknesses while the Fionas triumph on the back of their hidden strengths.

Clanchy’s obsession with Scottishness makes for poor short stories. They lack profundity and are full of one-dimensional characters that seem to be at the service of their creator’s outdated and somewhat tiresome take on her homeland. She fares much better when she draws on more contemporary references. This Problem Is For You, for instance, explores a complex three-way relationship between immigrant schoolchildren, shifting seamlessly between storylines and inner monologues. Faced with the incomprehension of their white teachers, the children walk a fine line between overcoming their new circumstances and being destroyed by them: “On the table I see Miss Brown’s white hands and beside them my hands, black as the leaves on the road... the England voice and the voice of my country...”

Even though This Problem Is For You has a tragedy at the centre of it, it’s one of the few stories in the collection that, on balance, lifts the spirits. Another is the title story The Not-Dead and The Saved, which won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2009.

It tells of an exhausted mother caring for her tumour-ridden, dying son.

His remarried father is a hopeless specimen who searches for solutions in cultish quackery.

Despite being close to death, the son is one of the few males in any of the stories that has much life in him.

The strain that his illness puts on the relationship with his loyal mother and the death scene with her at his bedside are nicely drawn.

Many of Clanchy’s other stories, however, are devoid of the human love that mitigates disaster or is strengthened by it.

Misery comes in many forms – cancer, anorexia, bulimia, Alzheimer’s – and is seldom redeemed by motherhood or relieved by male partners, as useless in sickness as they are in health.

The collection isn’t going to win the feelgood book of the year anytime soon, but at least it’s a timely reminder that there are worse things in life than being a posh Scot.