Product details
- ISBN 9781787335738
- Weight: 530g
- Dimensions: 166 x 243mm
- Publication Date: 18 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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**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.
