What We Can Know

McEwan's most richly layered work' Sunday Times 'A gripping page-turner' Observer 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. Review: What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt's Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan's trim, beautifully ordered sentences -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Sunday Times * A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser... What We Can Know 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 * An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it's...rewarding and thought-provoking * Financial Times * What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart -- Elif Shafak [A] dazzling novel... [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by "slow roasting" * Independent * McEwan's arrestingly relevant new novel... [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory * Mail on Sunday * A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt * Observer * Author Biography: 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.