It’s no surprise that keen readers have looked to books for historical analogues or literary insights into the coronavirus outbreak. Sales of the English translation of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste (The Plague) are reported to have risen by around 1,000% in recent weeks. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s Peculiar Ground have also all seen their mentions rise. So have other volumes with contagious disease or dystopian themes, presumably because readers hope they might shed some light on our unprecedented global situation.

Of course there is more time for things like reading when we are stuck at home, unable to socialise or go to museums and concerts – or to borrow books, since libraries are shut. But it is notable that fiction sales, along with home-learning titles, experienced the greatest boost as the UK’s lockdown began, because this indicates that it is not facts that people are after, but stories.

For busy people, time to read fiction is often associated with holidays. With family get-togethers and outings disallowed, the fortnight either side of Easter was hardly that – even for children and adults with time off work. But the pandemic has forced a break in routine and presented people of all ages with many hours to fill up. Spying an opening for one of her enthusiasms, the Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li set up an online book group to read one of the longest of all novels: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Waterstones reported that big names including F Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison were selling well – although cutbacks by wholesalers have led to delays and difficulties, particularly for independent retailers (in San Francisco, the iconic City Lights bookshop raised $500,000 from supporters after warning that its future was in jeopardy).

“The house of fiction has not one window, but a million,” wrote Henry James. People read and write novels in a multitude of ways. While Camus’s readers are curious about how a French existentialist thought a disease outbreak might pan out, some people will be seeking entertainment or distraction.

But there is one thing that readers of fiction have in common: the wish to be absorbed in a story that is not about themselves. It’s not hard to see why such flights of imagination attract those who are physically confined. Not only because they have the power to lift us out of our domestic settings and away from the panicked scrolling of news headlines, but also because they can interest us in the lives and characters of other, made-up people.

Except for young children, reading is usually a solitary activity. But it is the opposite of antisocial. Of course there are cruel and cynical novels, and many that are not primarily interested in human beings or relations. But plays, poetry and fiction have made a vast contribution to our knowledge and understanding of each other. As well as a private pursuit, reading is a builder of fellow feeling. That’s why many people find bookshops, libraries and book groups so congenial.

EM Forster once described words as “the wine of life”. Clearly this is the wrong metaphor for non-drinkers. But it neatly conveys the garrulous aspect of literature: the ambition that it should bring people together. That people reach for books in such bleak times can give us hope that empathy, not misanthropy, is winning.