What We Can Know: The new Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Atonement

In What We Can Know, master storyteller Ian McEwan delivers a genre-blending literary thriller that weaves together a lost poem, a crime of passion, and a future shaped by climate catastrophe. Set across two timelines - 2014, when a great poem is read aloud and never heard again, and 2119, where rising seas have swallowed the UK's lowlands - the novel follows scholar Tom Metcalfe as he pores over early twenty-first-century archives, captivated by the freedoms of a vanished world. His discovery of a clue to the lost work unravels a story of entangled love and brutal violence, challenging everything he thought he knew.

A sweeping work of speculative literary fiction, this Sunday Times bestseller reclaims the present from looming disaster and imagines a future where hope endures. Exploring profound questions about memory, loss, and human resilience, What We Can Know is a daring, richly layered novel that confirms Ian McEwan's place among the most essential voices in contemporary English literature.