What We Can Know

From 2014 to the year 2119, in a world submerged by rising seas, What We Can Know spans the past, present, and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going. A masterpiece and Ian McEwan's finest novel yet.

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, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining island archipelagos, 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 lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.