I came to this novel without prior experience of McEwan’s work, and without having read much beyond the description.
What We Can Know moves across two timelines: one near enough to our present to feel recognizable, and one set a century ahead in a future that is entirely plausible — and therein lies the haunting. At the center of both is a corona, a poem read aloud at a small dinner, and then essentially lost to time. What radiates outward from that absence is where the story lives: choices and their long shadows, love and its complications, ecological consequence, and the persistent human question of what we can actually know about another person, or a moment, or the past, or the future that past is shaping.
The novel is a slow build, the opening asks for patience and a degree of trust. I found it genuinely difficult to get into; where it was going was a murky path I wasn’t sure I’d ever slog out of. I persevered, slowly. It took months to make it more than a bit of a way in. When the structure opened up, I couldn’t read quickly enough, and I am still turning the connections and layers over in my mind.
For readers who haven’t encountered McEwan before, or who have seen mixed reviews and are uncertain: this is a novel worth the time it asks for. It is, perhaps, a good summer read — not for the beach, but for the kind of reading that happens in pieces, picked up and set down, and then quietly thought about in between. The characters across both timelines are genuinely, sometimes uncomfortably, human. The worlds McEwan builds feel earned. And the questions the book raises about memory, truth, and what history can actually recover have stayed with me in the way that good literature tends to.