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What We Can Know

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What We Can Know

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: David Rintoul, Rachel Bavidge
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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

© Ian McEwan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Best of 2025 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction World Literature

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
Most relevant
I always forget how much I enjoy Ian McEwan until I escape into another of his books. The first half is riveting, and I found his depiction of the future and the details of the major events that unfolded absolutely fascinating. The second half is also engaging, but there are some haunting moments that I wish I could forget. There is a satisfying denouement and it was a great listen.

A story of two halves

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Our literary giants don't often manage to pull off good sci-fi but in the first half of the book McEwan does just that. It's original, the world building works well and of course its well written. Then comes the second half which is set in the present and is OK if you want another tale of middle class literary life. I didn't.

A book of two halves

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I had bought this as a top 2025 sci fi book ..... while I didn't see it as sci fi I enjoyed it more than possibly the last 40 or 50 aufiobooks I have listened to ... fantastic narration and story was sublime

came for the sci fi

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This is an amazing novel that seamlessly blends sci fi with poetry, domestic drama, romance, climate change and foul play.
The sweep of the novel is ambitious and might, in lesser hands, have faltered but McEwan pulls it off in great style and he lands the ending beautifully. The reading is also pitch perfect.

Astonishing

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A genuinely engaging story. Im not a fan of sci fi or futurism etc, finding the cliches of ‘dystopian’ futures as trite today as ‘flying cars’. Here the author tells us a story that spans a period of some120 years, from around 2000 to around 2120, so it is, at least in part, a foretelling, with McEwan as our soothsayer.
What was genuinely interesting for me was the way a real human story about individual lives, and the human experience was set against a drastically altered world in the near future, one which was altered by conflict and climate, but had not dissolved into the well worn tropes of so many writers efforts at prediction.
I think this was the first time since I stepped through the wardrobe into Narnia that I was so entertained and so thoroughly bought into another world. McEwan recognizes that people, at least the types of people he knows, will remain in may ways the same, that they will carve their space in new societies much as they have always done, and this allows him to tell a story that is part literary romance, part thriller, part biography and part futuristic fantasy, and yet to keep us engaged primarily with a world he knows and we are at least familiar with.
I admit to finding it a little challenging to follow initially and to needing to adjust to the change of narrator half way through. I also found it to be yet another novel which seemed intent on redressing the patriarchal bias to the extent that all the male characters are villains at worst or ineffectual sops at best. Only the women’s actions seem ever to be legitimized.
It has genuinely surprising twists and turns and in this regard almost reminded me of Hitchcock, but at heart it is a story about the lives and loves, motivations and morals (or lack if) of a small group of artists and literary / university types. A world perhaps too often revisited by some great 20c British author’s who often seem to struggle to look beyond their own world.
In this sense the groups incestuous relationships recounted here remind me of Pinter and Amis et al and I wondered again ‘must everyone sleep with each other as if there are no options beyond the immediate circle of spouses and siblings etc?! I don’t suggest the real world (my world?) as celibate or prudish, but it is certainly a larger pool than the Oxford Don’s seems to be, at least in the 20 and 21 centuries!
McEwan tackles some very interesting themes beyond his take on the immediate future after we squander the planets resources etc, the nature of approbation and its relationship to art and art’s value. Poetry and truth, love and honesty and relationships. The ties that bind and so in. Too deeply for me to summarize here beyond what I have said. This is a book I know already that I will re-read in a few years and no doubt I will get even mire from it.

Literary futurism with a dash of Hitchcock!

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