“Do you have high hopes?” “I hope you like being called Hope” are comments I get frequently, often followed by a hearty laugh, and “I bet you’ve never heard that one before.”

My name is a symbol for something both life-sustaining — the essentialness of hope — and dangerous — foolish hopes. I am now reconciled to this.

I went through a teenage phase of making people use my more normal middle name, but it didn’t stick because it wasn’t mine. I now love the name I used to shun, but I also understand what a loaded word hope is.

At the end of a year so dreadful it has become almost a joke, hope is more precious than ever, but also less to be trusted. Where do we find hope in a year which saw an MP shot and stabbed in the street, a triumph of nationalism, a huge swing to the right?

My answer is, in books. I have always sought solace in fiction. As a child with non-verbal autism, I was able to understand the motivations of children in novels such as The Secret of Platform 13 more than I was able to understand my peers. From an early age I understood the power of the novel. Books were my companions.

Though I now have a good network of friends and a job, I still love books, not only as a welcome escape (though the ability to temporarily be someone else has always seemed like a special kind of magic) but also for what they teach us about the world, ourselves and one another, and the hope they give us for the world to come. I spent the night of the US election curled up with a cup of cocoa and Dodie Smith’s novel I Capture the Castle.

It was difficult to drag myself away from the internet but it was necessary. Twitter and Facebook were calling out to me, but the novel represented another world, offering me the chance to be Cassandra Mortmain in a draughty castle with her strange family. In 2013, psychologists at the New School for Social Research released research that suggested that reading fiction improves empathy.

While I find the study’s distinction between “literary” and non-literary fiction a bit off-putting, I do believe that reading increases your understanding of the world, and of other people — forging connections through story in a way that Twitter never can.

Reading teaches us not only about our common humanity (it is wonderful to see something expressed in words and think, “Yes! That’s exactly how I feel”) but also about the world.

Leo Tolstoy depicted a generation of young Russians trying to make sense of the Napoleonic wars, while Charles Dickens showed the bleak reality of what it meant to be poor in Victorian England. Charlotte Bronte wrote about what it meant to be plain and poor, yet clever and sensitive. All of these authors wrote with such empathy that the adventures of these characters, their thoughts, perils, loves, ideas, can be understood today and related to our own circumstances, though the stories are centuries old.

What has this to do with hope, though? Reading gives me hope because the chroniclers of dark times tell us that they pass. There is an element of “once upon a time ...” to everything, however bleak it now seems. This is not to negate the potential awfulness of the Trump presidency, the horrors of the war in Syria and the conflict in Yemen, and the political mess of Brexit in the UK.

In her post-apocalypse novel, Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel conducts a beautiful takedown of people who say that everything happens for a reason. What novels tell us is not that it’s going to be OK, or that it is all for the best, because it’s not. People will go on drowning as they try to flee Syria, climate change will get worse, and Trump could do massive damage to the world causing an upsurge in the worst kinds of prejudice.

But novels and stories tell us that this has all happened before, in a different time, with different names but similar narratives. They tell us that it’s OK to be scared, to have complicated feelings, to feel a bit lost, and they remind us that we are human.

Even in novels with “what if” scenarios — “What if the Earth froze?” “What if aliens invaded?” “What if we could travel through time?” “What if 99.9 per cent of the Earth’s population were wiped out?” — there is redemption in the humanity which survives. Everything is far from OK, but this has happened before, and will happen again. There are stories in everything, and reading keeps hope alive.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Hope Whitmore is an Edinburgh-based writer.