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.
“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.