There are books that have changed attitudes to women like The Women’s Room, attitudes to animals like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty which argued for better treatment of working horses. There are books that have argued for change in the treatment of the poor such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. There are books that have made us think about violence, poverty, drugs, such as Go Ask Alice, about nature versus nurture, such as Goldings’ Lord of the Flies. There are books that have done wonderfully creative things in fiction, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which was incredibly modern when it was published in the 18th century. It can be seen as leading a direct path to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Authors have given us new modes of writing and hence new modes of thinking. There is no doubt that fiction brings change by giving us the chance to walk in the shoes of another person, to emphasize with those who are different from us in some way. To understand history because we enter it through a story, to speculate on the future if we read science fiction. To make us travel to lands we might never get to in real life and to experience other cultures. Fiction, I think, lets us try on another life for size.

Reading novels can change us. And if enough people read fiction and experience it in different ways then there is no doubt that novels can change our world.