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What We Can Know
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From the Booker prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.
2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife's birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, 'A Corona for Vivien.' Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, 'A Corona for Vivian.' How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem's discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780593804728
- ISBN-10: 0593804724
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Publish Date: September 2025
- Dimensions: 9.45 x 6.51 x 1.15 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.11 pounds
- Page Count: 320
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According to Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan, What We Can Know is a work of science fiction “without the science.” The setting certainly evokes science fiction: a post-apocalyptic 2119 Britain that’s been reduced to an archipelago by the lethal combo of climate change and global war. But as far as the book’s style and themes, fans of McEwan’s literary fiction won’t find themselves in unfamiliar territory. The protagonist, professor Tom Metcalfe, has spent the better part of his career speculating on the contents (and even existence) of a 21st-century poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” written by renowned poet Francis Blundy for his wife. A corona, in this usage, is a poem consisting of 15 sonnets, the final one of which is made up of the first lines of each of the previous 14—a sort of uber-villanelle. Hard to execute at all, let alone well. It turns out that in the 22nd century, the humanities languish as the Rodney Dangerfield of academia, and Tom is alternately frustrated by his students’ intellectual disconnect and charged by his own ambition to ferret out the mystery behind this legendary unpublished poem. During the first half of the book, we see Vivien and Francis’ relationship through Tom’s eyes as he pores over archival material with allusions to dirty deeds too dangerous to disclose, although marital infidelities seemingly abound among the poet’s social circle. Still, the poem’s big reveal remains tantalizingly out of reach, even though Tom declares that “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” In the latter half of the book, Vivien takes over the narrative, filling in all—well, most of—the blanks that eluded Tom during the early stages of his research. McEwan wraps the whole bundle neatly in a twist worthy of O. Henry or Rod Serling, capably numbering himself among such masters, whatever genre you might place him in.
According to Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan, What We Can Know is a work of science fiction “without the science.” The setting certainly evokes science fiction: a post-apocalyptic 2119 Britain that’s been reduced to an archipelago by the lethal combo of climate change and global war. But as far as the book’s style and themes, fans of McEwan’s literary fiction won’t find themselves in unfamiliar territory. The protagonist, professor Tom Metcalfe, has spent the better part of his career speculating on the contents (and even existence) of a 21st-century poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” written by renowned poet Francis Blundy for his wife. A corona, in this usage, is a poem consisting of 15 sonnets, the final one of which is made up of the first lines of each of the previous 14—a sort of uber-villanelle. Hard to execute at all, let alone well. It turns out that in the 22nd century, the humanities languish as the Rodney Dangerfield of academia, and Tom is alternately frustrated by his students’ intellectual disconnect and charged by his own ambition to ferret out the mystery behind this legendary unpublished poem. During the first half of the book, we see Vivien and Francis’ relationship through Tom’s eyes as he pores over archival material with allusions to dirty deeds too dangerous to disclose, although marital infidelities seemingly abound among the poet’s social circle. Still, the poem’s big reveal remains tantalizingly out of reach, even though Tom declares that “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” In the latter half of the book, Vivien takes over the narrative, filling in all—well, most of—the blanks that eluded Tom during the early stages of his research. McEwan wraps the whole bundle neatly in a twist worthy of O. Henry or Rod Serling, capably numbering himself among such masters, whatever genre you might place him in.