What We Can Know

**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.

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.