What We Can Know — Ian McEwan

Title: What We Can Know — Ian McEwan

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Jonathan Cape / Vintage, Penguin Random House UK

Format: Trade paperback

Edition: First published by Jonathan Cape in 2025

ISBN: 9781787335745

Condition: Second-hand. Very good overall, with light shelf wear and minor edge/corner wear. Clean, bright copy. Please see photos for the exact copy available.

Set partly in 2119, What We Can Know imagines a future Britain reshaped by rising seas and catastrophe. Scholar Tom Metcalfe becomes obsessed with a legendary lost poem, first read aloud in 2014 and never heard again.

Part literary mystery, part speculative fiction and part meditation on memory, love and cultural loss, the novel asks what survives, what disappears, and how much of the past can ever truly be recovered.