What We Can Know

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

Thought provoking

Best novel I’ve read in some time. Global heating is deadly but poetry wins out.

Hear me out: a whole novel built around one missing poem, and it absolutely work

Hear me out: this novel starts with a poem read aloud at a birthday dinner and then jumps 105 years into the future, where a scholar becomes obsessed with why that poem vanished. I know that sounds extremely niche, until you realize the book is set in a semi-drowned 2119. This is McEwan-style sci-fi; the disaster is cultural amnesia, not space lasers.

And it lands harder because our present already feels like pre-collapse: war in Ukraine, fascism crawling back into daylight, religious intolerance and racism everywhere, climate-change denial while Alaska floods, nuclear threat humming in the background. Reading a book about the future now feels like looking sideways, not ahead.

It is also quietly a love story in more than one direction: the poet and his wife, her earlier marriage that still warps the story, the scholar’s own failing marriage, and his fixation on the poem itself.

Four stars only because McEwan flexes a bit with the literary references, but it still absolutely worked for me. And of course the twist lands; it is Ian McEwan.

Excellent!

A very enjoyable book that I'm still thinking about. A deceptively easy read, with subtle and intertwined themes. It's in two parts, and I immediately re-read the book in an attempt to reconcile them. Good narration. I was a little disconcerted that Rachel Bavidge made Francis sound like Margaret Thatcher, but upon reflection he deserved that.

A tale told by two narcissists signifying nothing

The story (plot, characters, themes) was not up to the high quality of McEwan’s other novels.

Unique

Nobody beats McEwan for intelligent and unusual narratives. This does not disappoint. The readers are also outstanding