# What We Can Know

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/ian-mcewan/what-we-can-know/9781787335738

![What We Can Know](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/ian-mcewan/what-we-can-know_978-17-8733-573-8-55a52958.jpg?v=2026-09-22%2002%3A35%3A15)

- Book: [What We Can Know](https://www.bookquiver.com/ian-mcewan/what-we-can-know) ([What We Can Know.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/ian-mcewan/what-we-can-know.md))
- Authors: [Ian McEwan](https://www.bookquiver.com/ian-mcewan)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-17-8733-573-8
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2025-09-18
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

'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. 'A true master' Daily Telegraph 'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose' New York Times