What We Can Know Paperback by Ian McEwan

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2026-06-16)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 320 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781039058224
• Item Weight: 232.47 grams
• Dimensions: 20.32 x 13.16 x 1.65 cm

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.

“The best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted. . . . [McEwan] demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart.” —The Washington Post

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.

About the Author

IAN McEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act, and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.