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What We Can Know

The new Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Atonement

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What We Can Know

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: David Rintoul, Rachel Bavidge
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In a world submerged by rising seas, can the secrets of the past be discovered? The breathtaking Sunday Times bestseller.

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message.

2119: With the UK’s lowlands submerged by rising seas, those who survive are haunted by all that has been lost.

Tom Metcalfe, a university scholar, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, he reveals a story of entangled love and a brutal crime that challenges everything he thought he knew about the past.

‘Full of wisdom and heart. I loved it’ Elif Shafak
‘A gripping page-turner’ Observer
‘It gave me so much pleasure’ New York Times
‘A dazzling novel’ Independent
‘Haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful… A wonderful book’ Kaliane Bradley
‘A poignant love letter to the vanishing past’ Guardian

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR for the Sunday Times, Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Spectator, New Yorker, i Paper and Barack Obama*

© Ian McEwan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Best of 2025 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction World Literature
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Critic Reviews

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences (Johanna Thomas-Corr)
An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking
What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart (Elif Shafak)
[A] dazzling novel… [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by “slow roasting”
McEwan’s arrestingly relevant new novel… [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory
A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt
An enjoyable work… McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect
What We Can Know is an astonishing consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present… It’s terrifyingly believable… McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss…rumble spectacularly throughout
What We Can Know delivers one of McEwan’s finest comic set pieces… [and] can be read as an optimist’s manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline… [and] a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia
An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful, What We Can Know is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era (Kaliane Bradley)
All stars
Most relevant
I thoroughly enjoyed the stories and character development. Well read by both voice actors, it was easy to listen to and hard to stop listening to go out what happened next.

Future forward and current past poetic murder mystery

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I particularly liked part 2 in the voice of Vivienne.
At times I was irritated by the academic focus in the face of climate devastation.

Multilayered and brilliant

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The more I read into this brilliant novel, the greater was my sense this is the best work in Ian McEwan’s canon. It’s a complex series of plots across three places in time, connected by existence & smaller threads. The characters are precisely drawn & the dialogue is captivating. The second half of the book is the true revelation - you’ll have to read the work to see if you agree.

McEwan At His Best

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Narration was fantastic, the books producers were clever to choose two narrators. The story was beautifully constructed with wonderful twists and turns. Ian once again delving into the human condition and holding up a mirror to us all. I was interested in the inundation history and wished he had given us a little bit more.

Brilliant

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A masterwork from a master. I am going to listen again right now. It has a sort of babushka structure and characters who are awful and real - “flawed and redeemable”.

Magnificent!

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