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PublishedJonathan Cape, September 2025 |
ISBN9781787335745 |
FormatSoftcover |
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'One of the finest writers alive'
Sunday Times
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.
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, 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.
