Ian McEwan’s Future Vision with a Literary Core
McEwan frames climate anxiety, memory and human connection through the mystery of a lost poem and a future shaped by rising seas. Intellectual yet readable, this is speculative literary fiction with a strong conceptual hook and the kind of moral unease he does so well.
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What We Can Know
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Ian McEwan’s Future Vision with a Literary Core
McEwan frames climate anxiety, memory and human connection through the mystery of a lost poem and a future shaped by rising seas. Intellectual yet readable, this is speculative literary fiction with a strong conceptual hook and the kind of moral unease he does so well.
- Book Synopsis
-
Ideal for readers who:
- Read speculative fiction that pairs big ideas with emotional depth
- Are drawn to a lost poem, a drowned future and lives linked across time
- Enjoy imagined worlds shaped by climate change, memory and archival mystery
- Prefer thoughtful, literary fiction with an ambitious sweep
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.
- About The Author
- Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. 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; Machines Like Me; and Lessons. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781787335745
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Jonathan Cape, (18 September 2025)
- Number of Pages
- 301
- Weight
- 394 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 234 x 152 x 25 mm
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