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.