- Published: 18 October 2025
- ISBN: 9781787335738
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 320
- RRP: $55.00
What We Can Know

















- Published: 18 October 2025
- ISBN: 9781787335738
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 320
- RRP: $55.00
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
Throughout, searching questions – not least about what we cannot, and refuse, to know – are couched in beautifully calibrated prose
Daily Mail
A carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterization and the propulsive drive of a thriller…[it’s] McEwan’s most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years
Financial Times
It is very rare for a novelist to write his best work when he has been writing novels for half a century, but McEwan has done just that… [What We Can Know] may be judged his masterpiece. Remarkable. This novel has a rare and delightful vitality
Scotsman
Ian McEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents… What We Can Know is not lesser, and the pleasures…are in abundant supply
Spectator