Ever since reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s extraordinary novel Go, Went, Gone three years ago, I have been hungry for more of her precise and poignant prose. In that book, which tells the story of a German academic and his tentative friendships with some refugees, Erpenbeck created the most memorable imaginative response to our times. I read it, reread it, and kept going back to it and to her earlier novels. How did she create empathy, without speaking for those whose lives are distant from hers? How did she take us on a moral journey, without false promises of redemption? How, above all, did she manage to be so honest, without falling into despair?

With these questions resonating in my mind, I opened her new offering, a collection of essays, speeches and articles, with enormous anticipation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this short volume did not entirely live up to my desire for it. It does not continue the journey of Go, Went, Gone, which I realise now was complete in itself, but it yields some insights, both into that novel and into her earlier fictional works, and into some of the influences and experiences that have forged Erpenbeck’s vision.

I fell particularly on those pieces that seemed to play in harmony with Go, Went, Gone. That novel’s protagonist is a retired academic who lived in East Berlin, and even now that he lives in Berlin, he feels the old borders pulsing through the new city. His experience sits closely alongside Erpenbeck’s own formative years. As she says, in a finely modulated passage on the reunification of Germany: “Freedom wasn’t given freely, it came at a price, and the price was my entire life up to that point. The price was that everything that had been called the present until then was now called the past. Our everyday lives weren’t everyday lives any more, they were an adventure that we had survived, our customs were suddenly an attraction … From that moment on, my childhood belonged in a museum.”

But Erpenbeck’s talent comes across in the gradual accretion of detail, and the two essays, “Homesick for Sadness” and “At the Ends of Earth”, recreate with miniaturist precision her childhood on streets that were turned into cul-de-sacs by the wall. Those cul-de-sacs and the glimpses of the west that lay beyond them, as well as the gaps and ruins of East Berlin, inform the development of a consciousness that is still preoccupied with gaps and transformations. “It was probably during that time,” Erpenbeck writes, “that I learned to live with unfinished things, and with the knowledge that houses built for eternity aren’t really eternal.”

That knowledge also informed her earlier novels, Visitation and The End of Days, which took intriguing journeys through the shifts of Europe’s borders and allegiances. It is not only Erpenbeck’s own childhood history that puts her into a very close relationship with those shifting historical sands; she has also been deeply informed by her ancestors’ experiences. “I’m someone whose father’s parents fled from Germany at the beginning of the war, and whose mother’s family fled to Germany at the end of the war,” she says in a speech she gave for her induction at the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

But Erpenbeck also questions whether these big picture descriptions really get to the truth of our experiences. In the essay from which the quotation above is drawn, she undermines its importance. “Are the important things something else entirely? For example: once I opened a cupboard because I heard a noise, and I found a rat sitting inside, startled at the sight of me.” It is this ability both to recognise the ways that political realities define us, and also to pay so much attention to the emotional and aesthetic experiences that may lie slantwise or in contradiction to those realities, that gives Erpenbeck’s writing its precious flavour.

Towards the end of this volume she turns her attention to the other theme that informed Go, Went, Gone: the experiences of those who come now to Europe to seek asylum. These pieces include an obituary for Bashir Zakaryau, a Nigerian refugee who was one of the people she thanks at the end of that novel. She decently conveys his political dreams: “He wanted parity, equal rights, he wanted to bring visibility to the invisible ...” But above all she recognises the personal toll taken by borders, the death of his children in the Mediterranean and the loss of the work that gave him dignity: “Whenever Bashir, the metalsmith, saw a railing, a gate, a grate, he would say, ‘This was my work. I can make this. This was my work.’ ... A few weeks ago he told me: I would like so much to have children again.”

In this attentive prose, in her desire to map stories that are suppressed and rhythms of the heart that keep being forgotten, Erpenbeck is one of the most vital writers working today. While this slim collection does not have the power of her fiction, it still reminds us of a humanity that, right now, feels terribly under threat, which keeps us connected to one another as well as to ourselves.

• Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections, translated by Kurt Beals, is published by Granta (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.