What We Can Know The breathtaking and immersive new Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Lessons

Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know is a literary science fiction novel spanning multiple timelines. In 2014, a powerful poem is recited once and lost to memory, its meaning the subject of speculation for generations. By 2119, climate change has reshaped England, submerging lowlands and leaving survivors to mourn a vanished world of freedoms. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, is drawn to archives from the early twenty-first century, fascinated by the peak of human possibility.

When Tom discovers a clue pointing to the lost poem, he uncovers a tangled history of love and a brutal crime. These revelations upend everything he believed about the past. Blending apocalyptic fiction with a profound meditation on memory and identity, this first installment in the What We Can Know series examines what endures when the familiar is swept away.