In a world submerged by rising seas 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. A quest a literary thriller and a love story 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. 'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday
Times 'A true master' Daily Telegraph 'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of
plot and prose' New York Times
