What We Can Know
The new Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Atonement
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4.2 • 47 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In a world submerged by rising seas, can the secrets of the past be discovered? The breathtaking Sunday Times bestseller.
‘Full of wisdom and heart. I loved it’ Elif Shafak
‘A gripping page-turner’ Observer
‘It gave me so much pleasure’ New York Times
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message.
2119: With the UK’s lowlands submerged by rising seas, those who survive are haunted by all that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a university scholar, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, he reveals a story of entangled love and a brutal crime that challenges everything he thought he knew about the past.
‘What We Can Know may well have created a new genre’ Sunday Times
‘Brilliantly plotted… In What We Can Know, the past is an irresistible riddle’ Washington Post
‘Propulsive…entertaining and enjoyable’ Financial Times
‘A dazzling novel’ Independent
‘Haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful… A wonderful book’ Kaliane Bradley
‘A poignant love letter to the vanishing past’ Guardian
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR for the Sunday Times, Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Spectator, New Yorker, i Paper and Barack Obama*
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 At the Bodlein Library, which has been moved to higher ground, Thomas Metcalfe fixates on the lore behind an unpublished but legendary poem by the renowned Francis Blundy, a series of sonnets said to have been written for his wife, Vivien, but which was only ever seen and heard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
A beautiful, haunting, superb book
I’ve enjoyed Mr McEwan’s writing, it seems, forever. Be it robots or , in this case, a huge and sweeping, emotionally resonant view of the future, full of the detail and touches that take an idea about what might happen a century or more hence into a wonderful, life-affirming yet bleak place I’ve never been to.
One of the best novels I’ve ever read, if that isn’t the type of literary fluff characters like those in this book would say to maximum effect. I read it in two extended sittings, broken only by my phone battery dying on a flight, and was equally engaged, enthralled and enamoured by it all.
If I was wearing a hat - and I’m the first to point out how the items every single man and woman plonked on the top of their heads disappeared totally in twenty years and then came back in baseball variants, religious coverings and masks lower down our skulls with different purpose - then please imagine it being doffed in admiration right now.
And this being 2026, my phone changed doffed into dogged, which illustrates the current state of AI incompetence and misery, yet is quite odd, almost creative and if looked on the right way, beautiful. And, equally, AI slop proving how doomed everything is. I, for one, salute our new AI overlords, safely knowing that my Simpsons reference, sarcasm and irony will mean nothing to the their moron-level “brains”.
Favourite author, gripping as always. Dark and wonderful
Favourite author, gripping as always. Dark and wonderful
Omg
Omg