What We Can Know
Ian McEwan | Paperback | September 2025
From 2014 to the year 2119, in a world submerged by rising seas, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going. A masterpiece and Ian McEwan's finest novel yet
'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
'A true master' Daily Telegraph
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Author Info
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; and Lessons. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
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