What We Can Know
A Novel
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4.1 • 325 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." —The New York Times
"Brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted."—The Washington Post • "A novelist of consummate skill."—The Wall Street Journal • "Elegantly structured and provocative."—Los Angeles Times
2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he 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 elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal 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, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ian McEwan traverses centuries and marries emotional depth with speculative inquiry in this chilling mystery about memory and loss. In 2119, Thomas Metcalfe, an academic in a partially submerged Britain, becomes obsessed with a legendary lost poem heard once at a 2014 birthday recital and never again. As he digs through archives and digital echoes of the past, Thomas’ research unearths a hidden saga of love, betrayal, and a violent crime that upends all he thought he understood about both history and the people closest to him. McEwan’s world-building crackles with atmospheric detail: flooded landscapes, hushed archives, and the electric stillness of history resurfacing. Splitting between Thomas’ future-bound investigations and the earlier, emotionally charged truths, the structure deepens the suspense while offering profound meditations on the limits of knowledge. What We Can Know is a smart, emotionally resonant thriller that interrogates what survives from our actions and what remains forever out of reach.
Customer Reviews
A perfect book
This book is perfect. It captures the incommensurable nature of life, knowing, acting, and understanding, all through observing what can be known. To say that all of it is true should be enough.
What We Can Know
Could not get into the book, did not grab me.
Truly thought-provoking
The glimpses of a catastrophic climate event that plunges the world into an unimaginable future doesn’t obscure McEwan’s extraordinary present-time story of love, betrayals, and guilt. I enjoyed it immensely!