What We Can Know

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, Sunday Times

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

Financial Times

[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"

Independent

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

Mail on Sunday

A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt

Observer

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

Literary Review

A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser… 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

Times Literary Supplement

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

UK Press Syndication

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

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart

Elif Shafak

An extraordinary ode to our flawed current and future selves, capturing the fragility of the humanity that binds us

Chioma Okereke