What We Can Know - BookWyrm

Hardcover, 320 pages

English language

Published Sept. 18, 2025 by Jonathan Cape.

ISBN:: 978-1-78733-573-8
OCLC Number:: 1503716651

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 …

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.

3 editions

ju reviewed What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

A slow devastation

4 stars

The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the way the narrator in the first part explores the past —our present— dissecting our societies, our complacency, our selfishness, in a striking but not unkind way. The future imagined by the author takes place after the catastrophes, in a much reduced and difficult world, but not the post-apocalyptic setting that's become so boring and cliche, and by framing it this way, McEwan is able to question a lot. Yet, the fundamental question is in the title, what can we know? And what can we do with that?

[email protected] reviewed What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Weird read

3 stars

I enjoyed the premise of this book - being set 100 years in the future in which we are history being studied.

It was difficult to read, being split into two parts. It covers themes of how much can we really expect to know about each other, and history. Even our memories day to day are unreliable and affected by emotion and preconceptions.

The stand out message for me was how well do we really understand those we would claim to. How have we misread others and how will we be misread outselves.

It's quite a slow book in my opinion, and you would need to be OK with not having every question answered (indeed, that's probably the point)

I enjoyed the premise of this book - being set 100 years in the future in which we are history being studied.

It was difficult to read, being split into two parts. It covers themes of how much can we really expect to know about each other, and history. Even our memories day to day are unreliable and affected by emotion and preconceptions.

The stand out message for me was how well do we really understand those we would claim to. How have we misread others and how will we be misread outselves.

It's quite a slow book in my opinion, and you would need to be OK with not having every question answered (indeed, that's probably the point)