Anyone who has lost their faith in the value of literature or doubts that classic fiction can help us to understand the contemporary world, must read this book. Beginning with the Nineveh tablets, the Gilgamesh epics and Ulysses’ voyage, these five essays take us through works by Dante, Cervantes and Kafka and stories by Jack London and Alfred Döblin, and end up asking fundamental questions: how does literary fiction help us to understand ourselves and others? What is the writer’s mission today? How does literary language determine, delimit and amplify the way we imagine the world? Can tales provide a society with an identity, be it genuine or false? And, is it possible for literature to change us and the world in which we live?