What We Can Know - by Ian McEwan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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."--

Book Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 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.

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It's a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." --The New York Times

"Brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted."--The Washington Post - "A novelist of consummate skill."--The Wall Street Journal - "Elegantly structured and provocative."--Los Angeles Times

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.

Review Quotes

"It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It's a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." --New York Times

"What We Can Know feels like a direct descendant of Atonement, McEwan's most beloved work, where an illicit relationship generates unexpected tremors, and fantasy and memory rush into the gaps between facts." --New Yorker

"This is all brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted. . . . [T]here is a daring realignment that boldly shifts the perspective and demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart." --Washington Post

"McEwan is a novelist of consummate skill, and his latest book is a deeply intelligent addition to--perhaps even a crowning of--his oeuvre." --Wall Street Journal

"[A] carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterisation and the propulsive drive of a thriller. . . . McEwan's most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years." --Financial Times

"McEwan's elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures." --L.A. Times

"McEwan's prose has never been looser or more humane. . . . The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. . . . McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he's constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. . . . If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy." --The New Republic

"McEwan fans, rejoice: the novel ranks high among his oeuvre... close to Atonement and Amsterdam." --The Boston Globe

"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." --Sunday Times

"A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser... 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." ―Times Literary Supplement

"[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.'" ―Independent

"McEwan's arrestingly relevant new novel... [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory." ―Mail on Sunday

"A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English." --Kirkus (starred review)

"[A] powerful homage to a lost era ... McEwan has achieved something spectacular and much needed, as he raises question about the climate crisis--future and present. Readers will also find in it meditations on the value of the humanities, the work of poets and biographers, the difference between knowledge of and poetical apotheosizing of nature, and a beautiful recognition of what it means to search for human bonds in words and on pages.... McEwan has crafted a story at once nostalgic and foreboding." --Library Journal (starred review)

"McEwan offers up a heady, intellectual tale that takes a searing look at how history is created--and distorted.... Dealing with themes as weighty as the inexorable forward progress of humankind, and the relevance of the past in a world where the present is both 'loud and ruthless, ' McEwan proves once again he is both a master of his craft and a gimlet-eyed observer of the human condition." --Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

IAN McEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act, and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.