The European Union is no topic for a novel. It’s not fiction. It’s boring. That’s what everyone told me when I began writing Our Europe: Banquet of Nations. So why did I decide to go ahead in spite of everything? Because I belong to a generation born with the notion that the construction of Europe would be the lasting, unchanging political framework of our lives as citizens. Now this same generation may witness its disintegration.

Today’s Europe is cut off from its own people, and no longer knows how to arouse political enthusiasm. All we see now is its unwieldiness; we forget the utopia at its heart. And yet I remain convinced that, despite our often legitimate anger and frustration with the slowness and dissension within the EU, it remains the most astonishing political adventure of recent decades. Where else and when have 28 countries decided, freely and democratically, to join their fates together?

I opted for the form of a poem rather than an essay, because I believe that the language of poetry is best suited to tell the story of the ashes and utopia from which we were born. Our Europe: Banquet of Nations is a long narrative poem about how one can still want to be European today, and ardently. Here are 10 books that have shaped Europe as we know it.

1. The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer

I’m cheating a little by beginning with these two. But how can I not? From the very beginning there have been wars and voyages, interminable fighting and then the long wandering that follows victory. The Iliad and the Odyssey have engendered so many other works, appeared in other forms, been re-examined (from Virgil to Joyce), that, when it comes to literature, they are Europe’s shared foundation.

Austrian author Stefan Zweig, pictured circa 1920. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

2. The Sleepless World by Stefan Zweig

Zweig is our great, worried European. His entire opus could find its place on a reading list about Europe, but I like this essay (published in Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink) because it develops the motifs of insomnia and nervousness. Zweig sensed the world around him was becoming agitated, and that this would lead to bloodshed.

3. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I cannot talk about Europe without mentioning the Mediterranean, and The Leopard is one of the greatest Mediterranean novels. It has been unjustly overshadowed in recent years by Visconti’s fine film; one must read Lampedusa to immerse oneself in these southern lands where splendour and misery live side by side, and to understand that our heritage is one of both blood and light.

Londons National Theatre stages Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

4. The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht

Read it, listen to it, or see it performed: Brecht’s cheeky voice and Kurt Weill’s music remind us that our works must never forget the people. And when I think of The Threepenny Opera, I cannot help but think of the production by Giorgio Strehler – another great figure of European culture – which I saw in Paris in 1986, at the age of 14, and which I shall never forget.

5. Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

I love this text. I often go back to it: one must read it over and over to be reminded of what Europe did when it reigned over the world. Each country wanted to go farther and faster than its neighbours, when it came to colonial predation. It is part of our history. And Césaire reminds us of this, in an enraged and poetic language, and with a mad energy.

6. The Truce by Primo Levi

I could have chosen If This Is a Man, a sober and clinical telling of our great black hole. But The Truce sheds light on an a lesser-known, less debated aspect of the Holocaust: the return. Levi invites us to imagine what Europe was like a few months after the Allied victory: a field of ruins, full of shadows trying to return home.

Resistance … Albert Camus, pictured in Paris in 1957. Photograph: Loomis Dean/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

7. Letters to a German Friend (in Resistance, Rebellion and Death) by Albert Camus

Camus wrote these three letters in the midst of the war in 1943, while he was in the French resistance. They are a sharp and intelligent reminder of what must constitute our shared foundation: individual freedom, humanism, and the fight against barbarism. When Camus evokes this Europe, yet to be built, he calls on us to build it “in the wind of intelligence”. There is no finer compass.

8. In Europe by Geert Mak

This book is a journey both through present-day Europe and through time. It is a gold mine of information and knowledge and, above all, a precious exercise in repeatedly changing one’s point of view. This is what we are constantly learning how to do in Europe, and it is both difficult and thrilling: each history can be told from another point of view, and we are all the richer for this multiple vision.

9. Compass by Mathias Énard

Like its author, Compass is big and generous. Impressively erudite, the author invites us through his main character – a sickly, insomniac Viennese orientalist and music lover – to head down the road with him on his past journeys. In the novel, Vienna and Damascus mirror each other, as do Europe and Palmyra, in a dialogue of a thousand loving exchanges between east and west.

10. The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina Nel Cuore by Rhea Galanaki

One of the countless episodes in European history with which I was unfamiliar is that of the Cretan uprising of 1866. Contemporary Greek novelist Rhea Galanaki tells us the story of Greece’s struggle to throw off the Ottoman and Egyptian yoke, through the true story of two brothers who end up confronting one another.

• Our Europe: Banquet of Nations by Laurent Gaudé (translated by Alison Anderson and published by Europa, £10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.