Obama is right: novels show us who we are, and how others see us | Linda Grant

On this I agree with the president - fiction is what makes us comfortable with a complicated world. So why do so many of us go off it in the end?

Consider the puffin. I was reading an article the other day about them being added to the endangered species list due to climate change. Apparently they're Britain's most popular sea bird, though I don't know how many people have ever laid eyes on one. Heavy rain on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland has flooded their breeding burrows and cut the number of fledged chicks in half. Eighty-five per cent of French puffins were killed by oil from the Torrey Canyon when the tanker ran aground in 1967. My eye snagged on the French puffins. It was early in the morning and my dozy mind conjured up an image of a puffin in a beret, smoking a Gauloise with a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness tucked under its wing.

The article was full of fascinating information about climate change, but I couldn't get away from the French puffin and its existential crisis. This is, you might say, because I have an over-active imagination, or because my brain has gone soft from reading too many novels. I am all for the puffin now, which appeared in profile on the spine of so many of my children's books. I am in empathy with puffins.