What We Can Know: Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards Fiction Award 2025
Sep 2025 · Random House
3.5star
2 reviews
Ebook
320
Pages
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About this ebook
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS FICTION AWARD 2025**
'McEwan’s most richly layered work' Sunday Times
'A gripping page-turner' Observer
'A daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart' Elif Shafak
'A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser' TLS
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going.
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, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
'McEwan’s most richly layered work' Sunday Times
'A gripping page-turner' Observer
'A daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart' Elif Shafak
'A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser' TLS
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going.
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, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
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Ratings and reviews
3.5
2 reviews
Lola Griffiths
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October 24, 2025
Adding this one to me reading list
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.
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