What We Can Know

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

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.

'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times
'A true master' Daily Telegraph
'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose' New York Times

© Ian McEwan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences
Sunday Times
A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser… What We Can Know delivers one of McEwan’s finest comic set pieces… [and] can be read as an optimist’s manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline… [and] a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia
Times Literary Supplement
An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking
Financial Times
What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart
Elif Shafak
[A] dazzling novel… [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by “slow roasting”
Independent
McEwan’s arrestingly relevant new novel… [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory
Mail on Sunday
A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt
Observer
An enjoyable work… McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect
Literary Review
What We Can Know is an astonishing consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present… It’s terrifyingly believable… McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss…rumble spectacularly throughout
UK Press Syndication
An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful, What We Can Know is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era
Kaliane Bradley

User Reviews

Book 4.0
Narration 5.0
4.0
5.0
What a fascinating book this is! In the first part of the novel, a professor becomes obsessed with tracking down a lost poem. In the second, the poet’s wife tells her story. 100 years separate the two narratives. And did I mention that the professor is writing in 2119? I don’t want to spoil a thing, so let me say that this is a smart, well-written novel with plenty of surprises for the reader.
TippyCanoeGal 21/11/2025

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