Neel Mukherjee’s latest book comes marketed as a novel, but this is a bold claim, a taxonomic stretch. It shares similar contours to David Szalay’s “novel” from last year, All That Man Is, which charted the trials of nine male characters in nine self-contained tales. A closer comparison would be Sebastian Faulks’ 2012 book A Possible Life: presented as “A Novel in Five Parts” by the author, taken as five standalone stories by many readers.

A State of Freedom comprises five India-set sections, each of them focusing on a different individual and their quandaries, crises and desperate attempts to turn their life around. Mukherjee’s characters are so well drawn and their plights so affecting that we stop quibbling over how to categorise the book and simply lose ourselves in masterful storytelling.

Mukherjee’s opening tale follows a man revisiting India with his young, American-born son. As they tour Mughal palaces and mausoleums they are forced to negotiate hawkers and beggars, “suppuration and misery”. It gradually dawns on the man that he is no longer “a proper Indian – his new life in the plush West has made him “skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal.”

Ominous words from a mysterious man add a sting to the tale and bring it to a shock conclusion. However, it is Mukherjee’s three longer segments – one of them weighing in at a hundred pages – which constitute the bulk of the book and prove most substantial. Also dealing with the return of a native, the second story is the eye-opening first-person account of a young, London-based Indian man who, on his annual trip home to Bombay, forges a bond with his family’s difficult Bengali cook, or “cooking-aunty”, Renu. To the chagrin of his parents, the narrator cooks with Renu then, in a bid to understand her better, visits first her slum and then her home-town. What he comes away with is the hard-won knowledge that the poor are more than just “anthropological fieldwork or a tourist attraction” and that Renu’s struggle is not solely about making her own ends meet.

The other two meaty tales revolve around villagers venturing out from their dead-end, dirt-poor confines. In one, Lakshman adopts a stray bear cub, teaches it to dance and takes it far and wide to perform for money. In the other, eight-year-old Milly is taken out of school, wrenched apart from best-friend Soni, and packed off to the big smoke to earn money for her family as a housemaid. Both characters face formidable opponents – slave-driving employers, crooked priests, Maoist guerrillas – and experience first-hand brutal violence, gross misuse of power and gulf-like societal divisions.

A State of Freedom shows Mukherjee working on a smaller scale to that of his sprawling, multi-stranded, polyphonic Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Lives of Others (2014) without diluting colour, downsizing ideas or lessening emotional blows. Random bouts of cruelty – taming the bear, punishing a boy – unfold in unsparing and electrifying prose. Make-or-break moments come in breathless bursts. Despite his grim subject-matter, Mukherjee’s tone never slides into tub-thumping polemic or sententiousness. The book’s only fault is its last section, a short, meandering, unpunctuated coda which prioritises style over substance.

Whether ground-down by hardship, hunger or heavy home-truths (“Illness was a luxury for the rich”) or rising up and fighting back, Mukherjee’s beleaguered strivers earn our pity, and we root for them at every turn. All learn to their cost that life is cheap and freedom comes at a price but giving in isn’t an option. “Yes, her life may be nothing to others,” thinks Milly, “but to her? Wasn’t it something to her? Everything?”