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 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.

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 *
An enjoyable work... McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect * Literary Review *
What We Can Know is an astonishing consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present... It's terrifyingly believable... McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss...rumble spectacularly throughout * UK Press Syndication *
An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful, What We Can Know is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era -- Kaliane Bradley