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  • Published: 18 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529961584
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

What We Can Know





Epic and humane, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going. A masterpiece and McEwan's finest novel yet

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, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, 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 lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a 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 that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

  • Published: 18 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529961584
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Also by Ian McEwan

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Praise for 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
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