I read Atonement in high school and it haunted me for years, so I came into What We Can Know with high expectations. This isn’t the kind of book that shocks or overwhelms, but it’s carefully constructed, intellectually engaging, and lingers after you put it down.

The story moves between 2014 and 2119, tied together by a missing poem and the people—past and future—obsessed with it. McEwan is less interested in traditional plot twists and more in how memory, legacy, and interpretation shift across time. The future setting isn’t speculative in the sci-fi sense; it’s more of a literary vantage point, used to frame the fragility of the present.

The book works best as a quiet reflection on art, ego, and what remains after people are gone. There’s a sense of emotional distance to the narration, which might put some readers off, but I found it appropriate for the themes. It’s a novel about knowledge—how limited, flawed, and often uncomfortably partial it is.

Not as emotionally harrowing as Atonement, but just as precise. A rewarding, thoughtful read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

The ‘Seattle Times’ calls ‘What We Know’ “science fiction without science”.

Ian McEwan says:
“I’ve written a novel about a quest, a crime, a revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving”.
“In our times, we know more about the world than we ever did, and such knowledge will be hard to erase. My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each of these across the barriers of time”.

“How many irrecoverable secrets and stories are lost to the past? McEwan’s genius in this novel is to recover, in an exquisite fee of storytelling, a long lost secret”.

The novel begins in the day of 2119.
We meet Thomas Metcalfe. He took an overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at a small quay near Maentwrog - under - Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. There had been a nuclear accident that turned Great Britain into a series of archipelagos.

It might be fair to describe Tom Metcalfe as an ‘obsessive scholar’ who is fixated on uncovering a missing poem. The poem isn’t the only thing that has been lost since the nuclear accident/pre-flood world….but he has hopes and dreams beyond pure bleak destruction >
> and as the title of this novel suggests “What Can We Know”? ….. about a poem, history, culture, poets, artists, marriages, lovers, infidelities, secrets, betrayals, lifestyles, people’s grief, sadness, happiness, etc.
“When I was a child, I used to imagine that the past existed somewhere other than people’s heads. All that happiness and sorrow, those jokes, battles, holidays and people could not simply disappear. Surely, the past lingered in a hidden dimension by its place of origin”.

“We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less”.

“A nation is so large and full of things and ideas that it takes a lot of determined folly to ruin it all. So with the planet. We wrecked much of it, but not everything. Here was the other story, not of the dead but of the descendants of the survivors, whose three - word history was bleakly simple: ‘we scraped through’.
Devastated cities came back to life or were established elsewhere, just as they always had been. Significant parts of the knowledge base were preserved. Many institutions crawled through the gaps between catastrophes. People lived at poverty level, but they lived.
When the rising curve of global temperatures met the descending curve of population numbers and industrial activity, nature seized the moment, and pushed up through the ruins. Constant destruction, constant reinvention. Sail through the Clearwaters of the Cotswold Islands and be delighted by what’s starting to come back. We might one day lose our internet or be reduced much further to become subsistence peasants, or dissolve into widely separated, bands of hunter-gatherers eking a hard life from a degraded biosphere”.

Tom was obsessively driven….seemed lonely to me too. He wanted to find the missing poem that Francis Blundy wrote for his wife, Vivien in 2014. The evening was a birthday celebration for Vivien. (Note: Vivien did all the preparations: the food shopping, the cooking, cleaning, etc. for her own birthday party). Her poet husband, Blundy, (inconsiderate, self-absorbed, misogynistic, narcissistic, and perhaps talented) planned on reading his poem to the evening guests. HAPPY BIRTHDAY VIVIEN….(let’s make your birthday celebration all about me)….lol ….
The poem was given to Vivien that evening ….but then……seemed to vanish…..

At the beginning of this novel, I thought back to “Bell Canto” by Ann Patchett …..(both novels had a dinner gathering with friends with a lavish atmosphere)…..BOTH DELICIOUS mouth-watering-DINNER SCENES ….
However ….moving on…..
…..the similarities stop there. This story is gloomier…with serious inquiry into epistemology, history, the limits of what we can know.

A few excerpts….(nothing spoiling)
….just teasers to share the beautiful language …..
of ways McEwan captivates our mind and soul.
“The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter — it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis. But we count ourselves a lucky generation. Together, science and technology (a technology, largely devoted to the search for materials or their substitutes) devour most of the meagre feast, and we take the crumbs. But historically, these leftovers are almost sufficient, and do not cost much anyway.”

“The men, young poets, who came to sit at the master’s feet, were quietly envious of Blundy’s ‘no - finger’- lifted life”.
“It was common among the generation that came of age in the 1950s and early 60s and, of course, in every generation before it, for the men, especially the writers, to sit back and dream while the women busy themselves around the house. No one complained or even noticed.
Then, poor chaps, along came feminism’s second wave in the early 70s, determined to sweep away such civilized arrangements”.

“The evening may have once been a private affair, but it no longer was. The issue was not a loss birthday poem read after dinner, it was what the poem by its non-existence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective, anger, and a focus of unhinged reverence; Blundy’s choice of form, it was said, told all. A corona was an ornate anachronism in the twenty-first century. The poem, though no merit of its own, but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire a political economy, global history and suffering”.

“Let me repeat. Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are the poor cousins and we don’t get the smartest bunch”.

“As our dean once said in a speech, we have robbed the past of its privacy”.

“What Can We Know” is intensely sophisticated….curious…. demanding….richly written…. highly compelling….. authentic and original.
Timely and Timeless!

This is a great pice of lit fic. It questions what we actually know about the past and what we can know. A deep look at how we sometimes romanticize what came before without actually knowing it and perhaps realizing we can never trully know it. It is a quiet critic on how things are today and the things we are doing in this era that may change how things are done in the future. Highly recommend this to every one regardless of preferred genre. Easy 5 Stars.

This book left me sitting in silence when I finished it. It is not loud or showy. It is sharp, intimate, and unflinchingly honest. McEwan captures the quiet ache of memory, family, and the weight of what is left unsaid. The characters felt so real I wanted to reach through the page and sit beside them just to listen. Every detail was precise, every emotion understated but deeply felt.

If you love quiet stories that sneak up on you and leave you thinking about them for days, this one is worth every page

Grateful to NetGalley for the ARC!

In 2014 the celebrated poet Francis Blundy writes a poem for his wife for her birthday called "A Corona for Vivien." In 2119, Thomas and Rose are professors who study the twenty-first century, a period right before geopolitics and climate change led to the collapse of the world as it was known. Thomas in particular is deeply immersed in the possibility of finding "A Corona for Vivien", which has never been published and over time, the dinner where it was read and the lost poem itself have become revered among historians and scholars. When Thomas finds a clue that may point to a physical location of a copy of the poem, he and Rose set off in hopes of finding the masterpiece.

This novel is incredible, with stunning prose and a richly imagined near future. The themes of this novel (how our romanticized versions of the past and historical figures are only shadows of the truth) are timely and McEwan remains one of our greatest living writers.

4.5/5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. A fascinating story that shows a complicated future in the year 2119 where England, and many other countries, are dealing with the devastation of rising seas from a nuclear incident. While their world is in many ways just a shadow of how we live, a scholarship for what came before still thrives. Thomas, a scholar, becomes obsessed with a dinner party where a famous poet wrote a poem to his wife. There is no known copy of the poem and its content has only been speculated about. Thomas goes to great lengths to try and track down any clues. The second half of the book shows the relationship between the poet and his wife, leading up to that dinner. The beauty of the book is that when you look back ten, twenty, a hundred years, you can never know everything about someone else, as shown in this book by way of example being you can’t know everything about your best friend or even about who you marry and live your life with.

Thank you so much for an early copy. This is not the first book I have read by Ian McEwan.

I absolutely love the different timelines. The one set a hundred years from now was very intriguing. The mystery and the questions kept me on the toes and made the story fly by.

Ian McEwan takes a dual timeline approach to a literary mystery and whether art can maintain its meeting when the world is utterly changed.

The timeline I found most arresting is the one set in 2119, when rising sea levels worldwide following a nuclear accident has turned Britain into a series of archipelagos. Much has been lost. Academia is now focused on survival engineering, but there are many who long for a world that seems incredibly rich in comparison to the modern world.

Tom Metcalfe is one of these academics who are drawn by the abundance of the pre-flood world. His focus of study is the work of Francis Blundy, who (along with Seamus Heaney) was one of the most admired poets of the early 21st century and whose work is still studied. His special area of interest is a poem Blundy wrote for his wife Vivian to celebrate her birthday in 2014. He read it to the guests at the party, gave the only copy to Vivian, and the poem vanished. Tom dreams of finding that poem, written in a complex form called a corona, which he feels will encapsulate the soul of that lost world with its freedoms and excitement. It may do so, but not in the way Tom expects.

Vivian Blundy's 2014 birthday party is loving recreated by McEwan as Vivian prepares a beautiful dinner for her closest friends in their country home. It seems that Vivian had given up her own academic and writing careers to support Blundy, a genius for sure, but also a self-absorbed, selfish man. McEwan will take this belief and peel it back until the most painful core is exposed.

Does the poem "A Corona for Vivian" still exist? If Tom finds it, can a poem change the common belief that the pre-flood world was so selfish that it destroyed the planet for its own comfort and ego?

"What We Can Know" is a thorny novel packed with questions and excruciating secrets. I was about to say that this novel reminded me of A.S. Byatt's "Possession" with its search for a beloved author's lost poem, but McEwan's book is much darker. I had to put it down several times so my mind could absorb what had just happened. You'll think about this novel long after you put it down.

Many thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for a digital review copy in exchange for my opinion. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.