This week at the Edinburgh international book festival, Nicola Sturgeon interviewed her favourite crime novelist, the indomitable Val McDermid. When asked by an audience member how, as Scotland’s first minister, she found the time to read, Ms Sturgeon replied: “A life without books and reading would, for me, be a life not worth living.” And, significantly, the first minister was referring to fiction in particular.

It is a mistake to believe that reading novels is frivolous, an activity that should be taken up by our leaders only after the burden of power is removed. Ms McDermid argued that the crime novel in particular will eventually be seen as the social document of our time – the literary form that encompasses the whole of society from murderer to police sergeant to judge. The novel, taken generally, is more than that: it is how to experience life through others’ eyes; how to understand “a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream”, as John Cheever put it.

Weighty reports and newspaper articles do their work, but, as writer Andrew O’Hagan also told the festival, “there’s something extra a novelist can do – and it’s to do with the grain of human experience”. Fiction is, as Albert Camus wrote, “the lie through which we tell the truth”.