What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

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, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

About the Author: Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen 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</i>; Enduring Love</i>; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement</i>; Saturday</i>; On Chesil Beach</i>; Solar</i>; Sweet Tooth</i>; The Children Act</i>; Nutshell</i>; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

18 Sep 2025

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan ISBN 9781787335745