What We Can Know

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: David Rintoul, Rachel Bavidge

From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.

2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

“A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.”—Kirkus (starred review)

©2025 Ian McEwan (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Our Place in The Chronology

McEwan’s prose, like human existence, is intricate and profoundly connected, always on the verge of self-aggrandizement and myopia as his stories within the story show. This novel is brilliant because it shows us those these truths while ultimately reminding us that perhaps humility and beauty will be the only things that will survive. With or without us.

Story craft

Loved every detail beautifully crafted
Truthfully I DO OBJECT TO REVIEWS REQUIRING A MINIMUM OF 15 WORDS

THAT IS OPPRESSION

Tremendous

So beautifully written. A pleasure. Unusual inventive story, great characters. Audible wants 5 more words.

A very slow start

I am a fan of McEwan, but man was the first 1/3 to 1/2 of this book was so boring. It could have been been condensed to one chapter and the latter 1/2 of the book left alone and it would have worked much better.

Incredibly brilliant

Ian McEwan at his absolute best -- and that is saying a lot! Hard to describe without including spoilers, but (1) it would be an excellent book even without the surprises, because McEwan's eye and ear for detail and precision are so impressive and satisfying, and (2) oh, those surprises. There is also a lot of fun in this one, with McEwan getting a few things off his chest that are not at all central to the plot (such as tweaking those of us who criticize others for their "misuse" of the word "hopefully" -- I promise never to do THAT again!).