What We Can Know

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: David Rintoul, Rachel Bavidge

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

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.

'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times
'A true master' Daily Telegraph
'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose' New York Times

© Ian McEwan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critic reviews

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences (Johanna Thomas-Corr)

An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart (Elif Shafak)

[A] dazzling novel… [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by “slow roasting”

McEwan’s arrestingly relevant new novel… [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory

A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt

An enjoyable work… McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect

What We Can Know is an astonishing consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present… It’s terrifyingly believable… McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss…rumble spectacularly throughout

What We Can Know delivers one of McEwan’s finest comic set pieces… [and] can be read as an optimist’s manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline… [and] a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia

An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful, What We Can Know is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era (Kaliane Bradley)

A fantastic combination of the future and the present

The epilogue paints a future which is believable and frightening against a modern day plot of sacrifice,and murder

Ian McEwan as always delivers

Brilliant story with a glimpse of the future. A little tough at first with a real twist in Part 2

Wow. Loved this.

Now I need to buy the physical book to scribble and highlight notes all over it. I felt there was so much to revisit and ponder.
Loved this.