What is reality? And who are we, the people populating it? Both fiction and philosophy are engaged in unraveling this questions, and their answers uncover the absurd nature of our existence, writes Joanna Kavenna. 

Albert Camus wrote: 'A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.’ As soon as you create a character you ask philosophical questions about the nature of the self; as soon as you create a world you ask philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

In an absurdist novel, as in an absurdist philosophical argument, the universe is fundamentally meaningless and any attempt to find a sane and coherent interpretation of events is doomed by the insane and incoherent nature of reality.