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

Utterly compelling

Loved this book. A story unlike any other, with a twist 2/3 of the way through that cast a different light on everything that had come before - thus proving the title. One of my favorites of this year.

McEwan at his best

Ian McEwan seems to have a preternatural understanding of the human condition, at least the English intellectual kind, and the virtuosity to create prose that gives the reader intimate understanding of it. I got a little confused early on about the time shifts back and forth a century but soon got the hang of it. The shift of narrators relatively close to the end is jarring, but quickly makes perfect sense. The narrators are consumate actors.

Lovely novel

The two era tale - one set one hundred years in the future and the other set in today - was excellent. The current era is dubbed “The Derangement” - perfect!

Clever story. And flipped perspectives.

I’m a huge fan of Atonement and this new book did not disappoint. McEwan fans and fans of good writing and storytelling will love it. The view of our times from those in 2119 is chastening. Thomas and Rose investigate a literary mystery with a plot twist.

A simply beautiful and haunting novel

Typically, I much prefer non-fiction to fiction, but I prefer this wonderful novel to nearly any non-fiction book I have completed in the last five years. It is extraordinarily vivid, clever, poignant, beautiful, mysterious, and real. The narrators do a great job with their roles, and my imagination was awash with curiosity about the places and events they described. Bravo to the author and bravo to the narrators of this fine and important novel..