Product details
Biographical note
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.<b><i>What We Can Know</i> may well have created a new genre:</b> the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s <i>Possession</i> crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i>. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, <b>all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences</b>
- Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…<b>rewarding and thought-provoking</b>
Financial Times
<i>What We Can Know</i> is <b>a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart</b>
- Elif Shafak,
<b>[A] dazzling novel…</b> [<i>What We Can Know</i>] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by “slow roasting”
Independent
McEwan’s <b>arrestingly relevant</b> new novel… [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory
Mail on Sunday
<b>A gripping page-turner</b> about marital duty and guilt
Observer
<b>An enjoyable work…</b> McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect
Literary Review
<i>What We Can Know </i>is an <b>astonishing </b>consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present… It’s <b>terrifyingly believable…</b> McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss…rumble spectacularly throughout
UK Press Syndication
<i>What We Can Know</i> 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
<b>An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful</b>, <i>What We Can Know</i> is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era
- Kaliane Bradley,
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS FICTION AWARD 2025**
'McEwan’s most richly layered work' Sunday Times
'A gripping page-turner' Observer
'A daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart' Elif Shafak
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, 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.
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.