First published in his native Poland in 2004, Andrzej Stasiuk's On the Road to Babadag won the country's main literary prize, the Nike, the following year. Stasiuk has been at the forefront of the Polish literary scene for a decade, and four of his books are already available in English: the novel White Raven follows a group of young men in the Beskids mountains in south-east Poland; Tales of Galicia is a series of vignettes of rural life in the former Austro-Hungarian province; Nine is a Warsaw-set thriller; and, best of all, Fado sees Stasiuk travelling around the European hinterlands  Romania, Montenegro, Albania, the Carpathians  musing on time and memory, east and west, history and fable, and his daughter's growing up. As if his prodigious output were not enough, Stasiuk and his wife, Monika, run a publishing house, Czarne, that specialises in writing from these often overlooked countries of Europe.

So: where is Babadag? It's a town in northern Dobruja, Romania. And why is Stasiuk going there? Because he is following his "perverse love for the periphery, for the provincial" in countries that do not "pine for the rest of the world". Though fond of old maps and atlases, the author-traveller prefers to leave his route to chance. Suddenly attracted by a river, a forest, a strange turn in the road, he looks out for those "cracks in the scenery that imagination might slip into". Avoiding motorways and cities, he prefers river ferries in eastern Hungary, or villages somewhere between the Black Sea and the Baltic, places where "time approaching from afar is like the air that someone has already breathed". Above all, he haunts the interstices of Europe, the borderlands, such as Transnistria, a strip of land on the border of Moldova and Ukraine, where the guards are "protecting space, a vacuum, borders that were merely an idea".

Stasiuk's prose is quietly effective. His back-of-a-fag-packet poetry merges nicely with his romanticism, his yearning for a melancholy pastoral in which workers are "fashioned from the earth", and for places in Hungary or Romania where everything that could happen has already happened, leaving "villages that resemble muddy turtle shells lying in a depression". He's good, too, on the poetry of name and place, frequently listing tongue-teasing villages, and thus following "the path of fairy tale in which the sound and music of words mattered more than their meaning". Yet he balances this against an exotic inventory of everyday details: local cigarette brands (from Romanian Carpati to Moldovan Astras), road numbers, car types, food (try the dish of cooked pig skin), descriptions of banknotes (which seem to get smaller the further east you go), and, not surprisingly, the booze along the way  "borowiczka, körte palinka, cujka, rakija, and eventually, around Lake Ohrid, Albanian raki".

Though he visits war graves in Slovenia and Poland, Stasiuk is fascinated more by legends and fables than by history, and by the writers who helped to reinvent or subvert their national mythologies. In Hungary, he refers to contemporary writers such as Ádám Bodor and Péter Esterházy, and to the 19th-century national poet Sándor Petöfi. In Slovenia, it's the poet Edvard Kocbek; in Romania, the anti-philosophy philosopher, EM Cioran. Cioran is romantically reimagined by Stasiuk as he passes through the village of the thinker's childhood. What's more, Cioran's History and Utopia, with its strangely life-affirming despair, bears a strong influence on Stasiuk's writing, as do the ideas about time and history championed by another Romanian, Mircea Eliade. Yet there's a significant omission, even more surprising given that he is published (in Polish translation) by Stasiuk's Czarne press: the Austrian Karl-Markus Gauss, another literary vagabond drawn to European border zones and, like Stasiuk, to the Roma. Gauss's The Dog-Eaters of Svinia is a brilliant account of his time spent with a particularly wild Roma community in eastern Slovakia.

"It never fails to thrill my soul," Stasiuk writes about Roma life, "that one can . . . practise the ancient art of rag picking in the midst of the postmodern and post-industrial." He is also enchanted by the oral history of Roma folktales and legends, and there's an evocative scene when he stumbles on a Roma settlement. But he doesn't take you closer; he prefers to poeticise, or perhaps just to live and let live, to maintain a respectful distance.

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag (and Fado, too) is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe, how will we ever find our place, our identity, within it?

James Hopkin's Winter Under Water is published by Picador.