What We Can Know - Hardcover

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 big, unabashed crowd-pleaser' — TLS

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.

The Story

• 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.