**SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS FICTION AWARD 2025** 'McEwan's most richly layered
work' Sunday Times 'A gripping page-turner' Observer 'A daring beautiful novel full of
wisdom and heart' Elif Shafak 'A big unabashed crowd-pleaser' TLS A quest a literary
thriller and a love story What We Can Know spans the past present and future to ask profound
questions about who we are and where we are going. 2014: A great poem is read aloud and never
heard again. For generations people speculate about its message but no copy has yet been
found. 2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are
haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe a scholar at the
University of the South Downs part of Britain's remaining archipelagos pores over the
archives of the early twenty-first century captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of
human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem
revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge destroying his assumptions about a
story he thought he knew intimately. What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the
present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not
quite lost.
