What We Can Know
Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards Fiction Award 2025
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3.9 • 24 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
**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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the deeply intelligent and endlessly supple latest from McEwan (Lessons), a pair of scholars look back on the present day from a future Britain radically transformed by climate change. By 2119, England has become an archipelago. At the Bodlein Library, which has been moved to higher ground, Thomas Metcalfe fixates on the lore behind an unpublished but legendary poem by the renowned Francis Blundy, a series of sonnets said to have been written for his wife, Vivien, but which was only ever seen and heard by those who attended a dinner party with the couple in 2014. In the years since, the mystery of the poem sparked public fascination with its purported depiction of enduring love. Thomas, self-appointed "biographer of the reputation of an unread poem," pores over vast electronic archives and bonds with Rose Church, a historian and colleague of his at the University of the South Downs, over their shared interest in the period and their anguish that the climate disaster was allowed to happen (both attract ire from students for their "anger and nostalgia"). The pair marry, but they hit a rough patch caused by Thomas's all-consuming devotion to his work. Meanwhile, an archivist leads Thomas to a revelation from Vivian's diary that overhauls everything he thought he knew about the poem and the dinner. The novel keenly brings to life a post–climate change world and conveys the struggle of humanities scholars to prove the value of their work. McEwan is in top form.
Customer Reviews
Favourite author, gripping as always. Dark and wonderful
Favourite author, gripping as always. Dark and wonderful
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