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

The What We Can Know novel series begins with Ian McEwan’s Sunday Times bestseller, a literary thriller weaving together multiple timelines and genres. A great poem is read aloud in 2014 and never heard again, its meaning lost for centuries. By 2119, after rising seas have submerged the UK lowlands, scholar Tom Metcalfe pores over early twenty-first-century archives, haunted by a vanished world’s richness and freedom.

Metcalfe’s discovery of a clue to the lost poem unravels a story of tangled love and a brutal crime, shattering his understanding of the past. This science fiction and apocalyptic & post-apocalyptic series fuses English literary tradition with environmental collapse, tracing memory and survival across generations. Set against a backdrop of nature’s reckoning, the series confronts looming catastrophe while imagining a future where fragments of humanity endure.

## Books in this series (1)

- Vol. 1 — [What We Can Know The breathtaking and immersive new Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Lessons](https://mybookbandits.com/books/9781529959215) (ISBN 9781529959215)

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Browse this series at [MyBookBandits](https://mybookbandits.com/series/what-we-can-know-the-new-sunday-times-bestseller-from-the-author-of-atonement).