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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
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I struggled to enjoy this; the story just was not engaging enough and I could not be interested in any of the characters. Feels like an exercise by the writer.

Well written but dull

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I bought and listened to this after hearing the author interviewed on the radio. I was expected a human story, but one where the 'apocolypse' had a much greater bearing on the narrative. Thinking back now, I'm struggling to see what it brought to the story at all. Maybe a slight nativity about a world only a century gone maybe. Ultimately it's a slightly painful story of a few folk a century apart living highly introverted, and in the big scheme of things, irrelevant lives that you need to buy into to finish the book. 'Hopefully' (you need to read to the end to get appreciated that - easily the best passage of the book) you will enjoy it more than I did.

2nd half better than the first but still not what I'd expected.

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This is a masterpiece. The words are beautiful, the story is thrilling, and the messages within are delivered with elegance and an unexpected gentleness. An important book which is also incredibly enjoyable. I absolutely loved it.

A masterpiece

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For all you English Lit. lovers this is the book for you. Throw in a whodunit and a bit of dystopia and you've got the novel of tge century.

an absolute stunner

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Very complex story, partly in the future, but with accurate and detailed observations of human behaviour. I need to listen again.

Amazing novel

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