O Que Podemos Saber

by Ian McEwan

2014: Num jantar para amigos e colegas próximos, o conceituado poeta Francis Blundy presta homenagem à sua mulher, no aniversário dela, lendo em voz alta um novo poema que lhe dedica: Uma Coroa para Vivien. Mal sabem os convidados que depois daquele jantar serão várias as gerações a especular sobre a mensagem daquele poema, cujo registo original nunca foi encontrado, permanecendo um mistério.

2119: Pouco mais de cem anos depois, grande parte do mundo ocidental está submersa pela subida do nível do mar após um acidente nuclear catastrófico. Aqueles que sobrevivem são assombrados pela riqueza de um mundo que se perdeu. No sul inundado do que costumava ser a Inglaterra, Thomas Metcalfe, um solitário investigador, idealiza o início do século XXI enquanto persegue o fantasma de um poema. Thomas sente fascínio por aquelas vidas selvagens e cheias de riscos, enquanto se debruça sobre os arquivos dessa era distante, cativado pelas possibilidades da vida humana. Quando tropeça numa pista que pode levar à descoberta do poema dedicado a Vivien, encontra também uma história de amores entrelaçados e de um crime brutal, que destrói as suas suposições sobre pessoas que julgava conhecer intimamente.

O que Podemos Saber é uma obra-prima, um tour de force filosófico, uma história de amor sobre pessoas e as palavras que elas deixam para trás, um enredo detectivesco que resgata a nossa actual sensação de catástrofe iminente e imagina um mundo onde nem tudo está completamente perdido.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Fantasy

440 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2025

About the author

Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

McEwan lives in London.

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please, when I die, just place a copy of this book on my grave. That’s all I ask—thank you.

The story is a brilliant meditation on how we treat history—how we glorify certain eras and idolize their people, obsessing over times we never lived through, often wishing we had. It exposes the absurdity of that longing, especially through the eyes of a narrator who marvels at our present day, which to us feels unremarkable.

From there, it delves into deeper questions: What do we really know about the past? How much has it left for us to uncover? And can we trust what remains? Is what we've inherited even the truth? How would we know?!

Alongside that, there's a quiet but piercing critique of our modern mindset—on war, on climate change. It doesn’t shout, it doesn’t preach. It’s a dystopia that creeps in rather than explodes, and it's all the more powerful because of that restraint.

Then comes Vivian’s journal in the second part—utterly wild, and it flips all those earlier questions on their head. But even then, it’s filtered through the original narrator’s edits. So what can we really trust?

Honestly, this is McEwan at his best. The way he handles these themes reminds me of On Chesil Beach. If you loved that, then run—don’t walk—when this one is released.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

What We Can Know is a dystopia… Another bleak and satirical version of the future we have no wish to live in…
We are carried a century ahead… After a radical climate change Great Britain turned into an archipelago… An academician arrives on the isle of Bodleian Snowdonia Library to perform quite a peculiar research…

After breakfast, one of the assistant archivists, Donald Drummond, showed me to my carrel. His domain included my period, 1990 to 2030, and he took a strong interest in my topic, the ineptly named Second Immortal Dinner and its famous lost poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien’ by Francis Blundy.

The library is something like a monastery… Readers sojourn in cells… The poem was the poet’s birthday present to his wife, read during the celebration…  The poem was lost but the impressions of those who were present survived… They are so different…

The poet wore a gorgeous mask. His apparent expertise was easily and rhythmically born, lightly folded into the lines with close observation and melodic grace. There was a clumsily symbolic Lord of Nature figure, set for destruction, but otherwise these were songs of seductive complicity. But Tony could not free himself from an ungenerous thought. This was fraudulent, it was fakery. Francis had no love for the things his poem seemed to love.

The story is an outlook on our times as if seen from the dystopian future… And the future is a corrupted variation of the present…

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. Our offices are dilapidated. Many of them leak. Our salaries are fixed at one half of the rate for our scientific colleagues. We console ourselves that we are more in touch than they are with the bottomless ignorance of the generational zeitgeist.

Some personal troubles are overcome… Some mystery solved… Some adventure taken… Some bygone secrets are revealed…
The past that historians see looking back isn’t the real past.

[Adina ( catching up..very slowly) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having now read seven of McEwan’s novels, I can consider myself a “connoisseur” of his work. Also, probably a fan, if you can say that about someone who dnfed 1 of his novels and gave 3* to three others. Anyway, I know his style and what I love about his books, when they fill me with the warm feeling of a really good book. What I also realised, is that if I am to like a McEwan novel, I have to be entranced from the beginning. I will absorb every word, every sentence, no matter how slowly the plot is advancing. If the book feels meh from the start and I am not in it with all my being, then I will not get warmer towards it by the time I am done with it. So, I kinda knew from the first 50 pages that What We Can Know is going to get no more than 3* from me. Yes, the writing is as good as ever, there some very quotable phrases (see below). However, I was not feeling it, I could not care for any of the characters. I was not repulsed either. Ok, maybe a bit towards all of them, past or present/future.

This is another of his speculative fiction. Machines like me was also a dud for me, so I should probably stick to his present/past leaning novels. The novel is structured in 2 parts. In the first part, the world goes to shits because of climate change and most of the continent is flooded. Nigeria becomes the wealthiest nation, which felt randomly chosen in the book to surprise the reader. Same with other changes in the world, we are told about them, but only the bare minimum, without ay explanations. Another example is the lack of planes. There are days with good weather so some should fly, I guess. The author did not give me a good sense of the future but it wasn’t one of the goals of the book, I’m sure. This dude becomes obsessed with a lost poem, but more alarmingly, with the poet and his wife. He is trying to recreate a famous dinner, where the poet gifts his wife this poem for her Birthday. He is a historical stalker, reading through all the couple’s past e-mails, journals etc to find clues about that lost poem. To me, the guy was a creep, who should have taken care of his real life instead of fantasising about a long dead woman. This part was well done, I understand what the author tried to achieve, raising questions about idealisation, appearances, unreliability of the past, perspectives etc. He is also making some good points about the present world we live in, and how we are destroying it, without too much lecturing. In the 2nd part, we get the perspective of Viviene, the poet’s wife and her memory of that night and her life in general. This part was more interesting.

The novel is good, albeit the flow was a bit slow in the 1at part, even for McEwan. It might be a masterpiece for other readers, unfortunately, it missed the mark with me. Still, I enjoyed parts of it, so 3* it is .

"That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot touch them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love, and there are still two guests to arrive."

"If I was transported back there, I would loathe it. The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of social media, then run for profit rather than as a public service. What, she demanded, of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders – take your pick – and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people’s careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation those times bequeathed, the poisons they left in the oceans, the forests they stole, the soils and rivers they ruined and the Derangement they acknowledged but would not prevent? It was all scorched earth,"

[Samantha (Reading_Against_Noise) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m clearly going to be the outlier here, and I’m perfectly fine with that.

I just finished What We Can Know and I have mixed feelings. I flew through it, not because I was captivated, but because I wanted it to be over. It stirred up a lot of emotions, some good, but mostly bad. The book is split into two parts, and my feelings shifted dramatically between them.

Part One:

This started out promising. McEwan’s prose is undeniably beautiful, even if it leans heavily toward the dense side. I was initially intrigued by Thomas and his obsession with a long lost poem. The exploration of his academic and emotional fixation had potential. That said, some of the climate and political commentary felt too on the nose. So much so that it pulled me out of the narrative.

Then came the infamous dinner scene. Finally — dialogue! I genuinely enjoyed getting a glimpse into each character. But once that scene ended, the novel took a steep dive. The text became dry, bleak, and read more like a drawn out research paper than a novel. It could’ve been edited down significantly without losing any of its point. I almost DNF’d it three times.

As for Thomas… just wow. Am I supposed to feel sorry for this man? Because I didn’t. He’s more in love with the idea of a woman who died 80 years ago than with the woman right in front of him. And he tells her this — then has the nerve to be surprised when she gets upset? Seriously? Meanwhile, Rose makes one misstep and suddenly she’s painted as the villain.

Part Two:

What the heck was that? Viv, you need help. A lot of it. I understand what McEwan was trying to do thematically, but the execution was extreme, if not absurd. The constant hammering of how awful she is became exhausting. Also let’s be honest, the men weren’t treated with nearly the same level of critical scrutiny, despite their own misdeeds.

Bottom Line:

While McEwan’s writing is undoubtedly skilled and thought provoking at times, this story didn’t land for me. The characters felt distant and unlikable, and the emotional payoff never quite arrived. There were glimmers of insight, especially early on, but overall, the book left me feeling more frustrated than fulfilled. If you're a fan of McEwan's previous work, you might still find this worth exploring.

Thank you to Netgalley for this arc

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel of ideas with a mystery at its core, Ian McEwan’s 18th novel centers around, as the title suggests, just how much we can truly ever know–of the past, of others, and of ourselves.

Thomas Metcalfe is a scholar of the humanities in 2119, obsessed with a poet, Francis Blundy, who was particularly active and successful in the late 20th and early 21st century. Blundy is particularly famous for a poem, ‘A Corona for Vivien,’ that was delivered orally one night to a small dinner party but never made it into publication, the only copy gifted to Vivien being lost to time.

At the dinner party celebrating Francis’s wife’s birthday, the poem’s titular Vivien, were his sister, Jane, her husband and Francis’s editor, Harry, and some other friends of the family. Through recorded history in the form of emails, text messages, and journals, preserved by the Nigerian internet in a post-climate catastrophe environment, Thomas has pieced together all collective knowledge and thought about the poem without ever having read the poem himself.

Though the humanities are a dying field of study in the 22nd century, losing out to science and technology while the world recovers from 100 years of environmental change and global conflict, Thomas and his academic partner and lover, Rose, are determined to continue the love and appreciation of the arts in their students’ minds.

Thomas’s relentless search for anything related to the corona (a 15 sonnet sequence in which the final line of each sonnet is the line that begins the subsequent) pushes him further and further into the past, into the lives of the members of the dinner part, particularly Vivien’s, unearthing long forgotten secrets and perhaps the answer to the central mystery of what happened to the poem and what it contained.

You are in great hands with McEwan. From the start I felt so assured that he knew exactly where this story was going, when to dispense what information, and how it all tied to the themes of memory, history, and the narratives that drive our collective understanding of the past. There is such a strong tension in the story, especially within the narrator Thomas, between the present and past, as someone who spends nearly all of his time dreaming of a world lost and fearing that it will soon be forgotten. If we do not preserve the past, we may be doomed to repeat it, or at least forget the lessons learned that can help us avoid future disaster. But is spending too much time in the past neglectful of actions that can be taken in the very real, immediate present? And how can we really know that what we think we know of the past is truly what happened?

The narrative twists and turns in exciting and interesting ways: ways I will not spoil here because it is so fun to discover on one’s own. I was constantly surprised, propelled forward by a need to know and fearful that I might never find out or trust what I discovered. In ways this reminded me a bit of Trust by Hernan Diaz, in fact. I think readers who enjoyed that will find a lot to enjoy here as well, with a speculative/cli-fi setting layered on top.

Thank you to the publisher for an early eARC from NetGalley. Publishing on 9/23/2025

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years, Ian McEwan was nominated for the Booker Prize so often that the judges kept him on speed dial.

But then there came a moment — say around 2016 — when he published “Nutshell,” about a ruminative, vengeful fetus, and it felt like we might have lost McEwan to the kinds of weird little novels that writers produce after they win the Nobel Prize. The sex robot in “Machines Like Me” and the large insect serving as prime minister in “The Cockroach” suggested he’d caught late-Coetzee.

Fortunately, “Lessons,” a grand, retrospective novel in 2022, brought England’s finest stylist back to serious fiction. And now, with his cerebral new book, “What We Can Know,” that spasm of fablettes appears permanently behind him — at least until the Swedes come calling.

McEwan is looking back again, but this time he’s looking back from the year 2119. “What We Can Know” presents a bleak prognosis cast as a poignant retrospection. McEwan doesn’t flesh out the whole 21st century so much as briskly review its well-known horrors, like a wistful docent at the Pompeii museum. By the mid-2030s, we’re told, the implacable consequences of global heating sparked the “Derangement,” a term that encompasses the raging weather and the concomitant madness of waste and recklessness. In the decades after a brief nuclear battle came the “Inundation” with its tsunamis, famines and plagues, which obliterated about half the world’s population. Rising seas submerged much of Europe and rendered the United Kingdom an archipelago of isolated enclaves.

Silver lining: “World literature produced its most beautiful laments.”

That strained note of celebration comes from our narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, a professor clinging to the obsolete study of literature in a reconstituted England eager to leave....

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

[Fionnuala]

The structure of this novel really caught my attention.

There's a very intricate frame story, full of detail. If it were a picture frame, the beading and beveling would be so extensive that it would hardly need a picture inside it.

But there is something inside it. A story that's even more elaborate than the frame story and which overflows into the frame story so much that it almost overwrites it.

There is a passing mention at one point of a painting by the artist Howard Hodgkin. I looked up his work and found a piece that perfectly encapsulates that notion of a frame story obliterated by the story it is framing:


Not a plot spoiler.

That's how I'll remember this book. Vivid and surprising, but destabilizing at the same time.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guilt, as always with McEwan dominates this novel that vaguely is structured like Margaret Atwood Handmaid’s Tale, with a look back at history. Human preoccupations and relations do not really change over time
In love we forgot that we too were things that could get broken or lost

An interesting work that takes a literature researcher in the early 22d century. Life has changed in many ways but also in many ways not. Obsession with a mythologised dinner and a lost poem gains poignancy in the second part, when the wife of the poet gets a voice.
This Ian McEwan novel for me was 3.5 stars rounded up and a pleasant surprise how the second part of the novel sheds the talkative meandering of the first section and zooms in on conflict, relationships and guilt from a first-person angle.

There is a lot of world-building at the start of What We Can Know, including references to loop quantum gravity (LQG), which in the end are rather superfluous.
Snowdonia containing the relocated Bodleian library from submerged Oxford, there is Nigerian internet, managed from New Lagos, and our main character is investigating a climate change denying poet from the early 21st century.

A party in 2014 brings about tensions between visitors and a writer and poet duo, who both have affairs. meanwhile in the 22d century the UK is now an archipelago republic where the average life expectancy is 62. Love and relationships however still form the backbone to human interactions in this world.
Remarkable little trauma actually impacts their day to day, Glasgow, New York and Lagos lost, 4 billion people left on the planet and Germany annexed by Greater Russia with temperatures coming down due to “limited” nuclear exchanges.

How the main character is then obsessed with a corona, a new poetical form, is interesting (framed by himself as A talisman to the survivors, and a promise of a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet, but he notes: Thinking is always in crisis

Aging and failing marriages form a clear theme, with some musings on how people could gave done something: Surely they could have done something beside growing their economies and waging wars?, even while there are talks about the third Sino-American war.

The highlands and islands of Inverness, teaching on 38 mile long islands that once formed England, while worrying about pirates in the Lake District archipelago and swimming with sea turtles and sitting under eucalyptus trees, it all feels a bit impressionistic, with the national AI feeling superfluous for instance. It's all a bit easy this vision of 22d century England, with white people being a minority.

Overall this section of the book gives Midnight in Paris vibes with the nostalgia that the researcher has of 2014 and 2025. The talkative, meandering way of the first section of the novel reminds me almost of Kazuo Ishiguro his writing style.

The second part, from the perspective of the wife of the poet, is much more lively in my view. Starting off hauntingly with an abandoned kid, a dead baby, affairs, dementia, this section gripped me. Topics like complicity, loyalty and guilt form main themes. Coming from a country that on social/medical affairs is more liberal, I found the central idea a bit thing to base the whole book on, is this supposed to be the biggest act of love?
Anyway, submission of a woman to a man seems such a main theme in the novel, even if this is set at the end of 20st and start of 21st century. What our marriages tell us about ourselves is also a fascinating thread.

How time serves as equaliser and blunts emotion is interestingly coupled to manipulation of archives and formalised memory. Who is remembered and who has true agency in the now?
Passive compliance and a faithless path and prose trumping poetry in brutality and directness also emerge.

It seems McEwan wants to say human (and hence novelistic) preoccupations and relations do not really change over time. On the one hand this is a comforting vision, on the other I wanted more of the intensity of the second part in the whole of the novel. Still a strong work that deserves more attention in my view.

Quotes:
The past was something they needed to leave behind

And I suppose the best cure for guilt is anger.

We are trapped between the dead and the unborn

What redeemed our father was his frequent absences

The good parodist does not go hunting with a machine gun

Nearly all if life is forgotten

Grief is a dream state

Travel was a false god

My god, you are weak.

If I go down, you will as well.

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever. Canny. Hypnotic. And nearly impossible to review without giving away parts of the plot and ruining the element of surprise that makes this book so appealing. Actually, it is two books in one; that’s how different, in context and tone, the first half is from the second. ‘Hypnotic’ is an apt adjective, applying to both.

The first part takes place a hundred years from now and revolves around a supposedly magnificent poem written in 2014 and recited only once, before mysteriously disappearing from the face of the earth. A scholar of the future searches for it, and in the process the boundaries between his obsession with a lost piece of art and the people and the world it belonged to become unclear. The archives of our digital age provide him with an abundance of detail about the lives and times of the poet, his wife (for whom the poem had been written) and the people attending the legendized dinner where it was heard the one and only time, but they give little information about its whereabouts in the following years, when natural and man-made disasters flooded large areas of the planet and led its population to physical and intellectual isolation.

The pace in this first part is hypnotizing (as in soporific) at times. It's a story of a nearly idyllic past that sounds a little comical because it happens to be our present and it doesn’t feel idyllic at all. It is a vision of a dystopic future, all the more chilling because its catastrophes sound quite plausible. It is imaginatively constructed and deeply thought out, and this being McEwan, a master of psychological suspense for decades, you can’t help suspecting he’s only lulling you into the jolt of the quickening pace and change of tone in the book’s hypnotizing (as in mesmerizing) second half. Once there, the pages fly by, the construction makes perfect sense, and you are swept away by the skill and mischief of a seasoned storyteller at the top of his game.

This is a literary thriller with the emphasis on the first word, but a thriller, nevertheless. It incorporates into the narration the author’s love for the written word and all those who keep it alive, his thoughts about what we leave behind for posterity and how the present is turned into a mythologized past, purified from its base realities. It is an alluring read, if only we trust the author enough to let him demonstrate that ‘What We Can Know’ is not always the same with what we should know before claiming we have a grasp of the truth. The past is real as much as it is a construction. The novel asks us to reflect on how much our individual and collective history is edited for the benefit of a much-needed, idealized mythology, while gently reminding us that “our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.”

Once they were people whose lives, friendships, loves and possessions were self-evidently real, while behind them and ahead the past and future were populated by shades. Now they were the shades, ghostly traces, their lives reduced to words, confined for decades in the dark, buried under packs of absorbent crystals, inside boxes stacked on the bolted basement shelving of a mountaintop library.

P.S. "The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth."

I just came across this Oscar Wilde quote; a most suitable caption for this book.

[Angela M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve read seven other novels by Ian McEwan and have enjoyed all of them with his complex characters and fascinating story lines and amazing writing. I can’t say I enjoyed this one. Maybe my mood , maybe being busy this time of year . Whatever it was I had a hard time engaging. A rambling search for a missing poem written nearly a century earlier . I just couldn’t connect to the obsession for finding the poem when England was no longer England and the world was suffering the consequences of climate change and a nuclear accident . Nor could I connect to the poet Francis Blundy, a character I didn’t like with the expectations of his wife that made her abandon her own academic career at Oxford . In the second part I couldn’t connect with Vivien, the woman for whom the poem was written from the century before. I found her negligence appalling . I disliked each of the main characters. That doesn’t necessarily make this book not worthy of praise for the prose. However, I can only judge the book by the impact it had on me and for me it was a slog to get through with no emotional connection. Three stars for the focus on climate change, on the complexities of infidelity, and the prose. I may be an outlier, so I recommend reading the reviews that got more out of this than I did .

I received a copy of this from Knopf through NetGalley.

[Pedro]

Get ready and spend the day with me while I review Ian McEwan’s upcoming novel What We Can Know.

I jump out of bed wearing only some white underwear, do a few stretches and run straight to the bathroom for a wee followed by a quick shower. Because you can only see me from behind, you can’t see my face, but if you could you’d see the big smile this clever novel left there.

Right after the shower, you can see me wearing some fresh white underwear while I pick my outfit for the gym. Today, it has to be something colourful and vibrant to match the strong sense of place in this piece by Mr McEwan. Bravo, sir, that’s how you take the reader for a ride!!

Speaking of going for a ride, I then head towards my super clean and functional kitchen where I have some avocado on toast, freshly squeezed orange juice (of course!) and a strong and aromatic cup of organic coffee. At this point, with the caffeine kicking in, I can’t stop marvelling over the imagination and intelligence needed to come up with a timely novel like this. Just for the record, Mr McEwan is now seventy six years old, and still managed to bring all these hot topics to the table without ever showing any signs of contrivance, political preferences, propaganda, fear mongering or personal opinions. Now this is something that only great writers can achieve. Period!!

With that feeling you have, after having read some amazing writing, I leave the house and fifteen minutes later I’m at the gym. Between stretches and deadlifts all I can think of is how the slower pace of part one cleverly built things up in a way that turned the second part into a complete page turner which I devoured like very few other novels in recent years.

Time for another shower, and a few minutes later I can be seen walking to work, still with a spring in my step. After a few hours of unpacking, shelving and recommending books, it’s time to go back home. The day isn’t over before a bit of meditation practice followed by a sixteen ounce steak and ten eggs. As I get closer to bed time (9pm as I need my beauty sleep!), I realise that I can’t take these characters out of my head, and that I’d love to read it all again just so I can pick up all the bread crumbs that led to that satisfying ending.

In life, nothing seems to be exactly how it looks, and I fall happily asleep with the knowledge that good novels still exist.

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his latest novel, Ian McEwan transports us to a dystopian world in the twenty second century. The novel is cleverly plotted, driven by literary obsessions and punctuated with murder and revenge. We are confronted with chimerical truths where facts are filtered through shifting prisms and emotions are fueled by smoldering desires.

Cartographers of earlier generations would be puzzled by the configuration of the map in the twenty second century.The planet has been ravaged by the excesses of previous inhabitants. Overreach by populist demagogues, over reliance on Artificial Intelligence and climate disasters have combined to alter the world’s topography. England has been overwhelmed by rising seas and has become an archipelago. America has become a wasteland submerged in water and dominated by unscrupulous warlords. Nigeria has become the repository of the digital knowledge of past centuries.

McEwan employs this dystopia to review the geopolitical missteps that have created this future world. He also provides a backward look imagining how twenty second century scholars wistfully review the quality of life in the pre cataclysmic twentieth and early twenty first century.This framework introduces a mystery that questions how we piece together the past from the digital and written traces that still remain.

A now legendary birthday party is the heartbeat driving the novel forward.In 2014 Francis Blundy has written A CORONA FOR VIVIEN,a series of interconnected sonnets celebrating his love for his wife on her birthday. He read his declaration of love to his assembled guests. This gathering has been canonized as the Second Immortal Dinner, as McEwan playfully recalls the 1817 gathering of eminent literary figures. After Blundy’s recitation, the revels continued.But the poem then disappeared, never to be heard, viewed or recited again.

Over time, the missing poem acquires a mysterious aura and its reputation has elevated to legend in literary circles.Thomas Metcalf is a scholar specializing in literature from 1990-2030. He has become obsessed with Blundy’s missing poem. He partners with Rose, his colleague and wife, in a search for the elusive creation.Together they cull through paper trails, internet accounts and digital signposts in a quest for the missing sonnets.Their search exposes fissures in their relationships that mirror the academic rivalries and backbiting extant in earlier centuries.The culmination of their research produces unanticipated results.

The first half of the novel is a literary treasure hunt.The second half of the novel shifts the focus from academic to personal.The two sections combine to become a discourse on knowledge, perception and the reliability of historiography.In evaluating the two sections, the reader is challenged to assess trustworthiness of historical documents.We are reminded that passion and intrigue lurk beneath the records utilized to evaluate the past.We are cautioned that data and records can only hint at the complexity of emotions that drive events. This craftily constructed novel cautions to look askance at the narratives entrenched in our recorded history.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian McEwan is a treasure and WHAT WE CAN KNOW is one of those novels where he really sticks the landing. Just when we think we know where it's going. . .he completely upends our expectations in a fashion that's brilliant. The first half is set in what remains of England in the next century, the world wildly different as a result of global climate change, "regional" nuclear wars, and the avarice of the billionaires. England isn't a couple of islands, it's a bloody archipelago. And a pair of scholars at a British university are determined to find the only copy that seems to exist of an epic poem by the 21st century's most renowned British poet. Their journey. . .and what they discover. . .is one wild ride, both intellectually and in the purest terms of a page-turner. Yes, there are discussions of why (and whether) poetry matters. But there is also murder, infanticide, infidelity, and (yup) the remnants of global cataclysm. Dive in. Dive. In.

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am all over the place with how I feel about this book. What We Can Know is beautifully written and looks at various issues/themes throughout the book. In 2014 a beautiful poem/ corona is read aloud and since then the poem has been a mystery, a subject for conversation, and speculation. The poem was written by Francis Blundy for his wife, Vivian and was read to her on her birthday. Those in attendance shared comments on the poem and since the poem has gone down in infamy if you will. This lost poem has baffled, dazed, intrigued, and fascinated scholars and people ever since. In 2119, Tom Metcalfe, an academic, finds a clue that may lead to the poem....

In What We Can Know, a lot has happened between the years of 2014 and 2119 due to a man-made disaster. The world has changed, Britain has changed, but people and relationships have not. This book set in the future looks back on a time that is still fresh in readers minds (or at least in this reader's mind). The future time has endured weather related catastrophe's, climate change, extinction of certain animals and a decline in the world's population.

Again, I was not sure how to rate this book. I enjoyed the writing, the themes, and the quest for the poem. This book shows change, but it also shows relationships that are full of faults, indiscretions, and justifications. The characters are not that likeable, and I am not sure if the author wants us to like them. They seem to do whatever they want when they want - morals be damned. So, what happened to the poem? You will have to ask Vivian.

This is a deep book in many ways and a simple book in others. I can see this book being made into a movie. There is a bit of food for thought here and would also make a good book club book. I have a feeling this is going to be a polarizing book. You will either love it or feel meh about it. The future does not look bright in What We Can Know. It's rather bleak and grey.

Well thought out, thought provoking, and intriguing.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.


Read more of my reviews at www.openbookposts.com 📖

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian McEwan's latest novel begins in the year 2119 with Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor who romanticizes our current time period, looking back to the year 2014. He's searching for a poem read at a dinner party, then mentioned by the attendees, and yet never published. It has seemingly disappeared. Tom is obsessed by this shadow poem, which over the years, has grown its own legend.

The first half of the book moves at a slow pace, detailing Tom's life and his perceptions and feelings about this time period and the portrayal of history. I confess that McEwan almost loses me. Then wham, the second half changes POV and the pace accelerates. I am now on the edge of my seat. What's going to happen next?

Told in McEwan's wonderful prose, he slyly, almost playfully, asks what does everyone know about everyone else? What can we really know about the past, the future, and about each other?

Publication 2025

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Memory is a sponge. It soaks up materials from other time, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth century psychology.That did not stop people from relying on their own or from believing in the recollections of others, if it suited."

Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2025

Reviewing an Ian McEwan novel never feels easy- a sense of in trepidation towards commenting on the work of a literary master .

First thing to say is that why this did not at least make the Booker Longlist is an utter mystery!!

What We Can Know is a book that will thematically be labelled in many different ways; but from this reader's perspective this a story about the power and falsehood of memory- how the illusion of success can lead to 'legendary status" ; the potency and intensity of being recognised as a master in your profession ( in this case a poet of the early 200s) and the higher self belief and wider recognition… but what is the truth ?

This is novel in two parts- the first part focuses on a 2014 event that becomes known as The Second Immortal Dinner - an evening where renowned poet, Francis Blundy, is said to have presented his wife Vivien with an extended piece of poetry known as A Corona for Vivien. This prose was read one time only to a small group of friends whose lives are entwined.

A century later in 2119- in a world decimated by war and climate change, Tom Metcalfe - a struggling academic - embarks upon a quest to find the elusive poem. In a world where, the lives of all in the past are explored through their emails, social media , digital footprint , Tom begins to piece together the lives of the attendees and supposed events of the night of the poem's recital. but what happened to the poem?

The second part of the novel is presented from the perspective of Vivien Blundy- her life through the 2000s leading to her eventual marriage to Francis. Vivien is the sole keeper of the truth as to what happened to the poem.

Combining philosophical questions , an adventure quest, the hidden secrets of lives and revelations that would change perceptions and history, Ian McEwan challenges us all to question where we are now as a species- what we could become - and can we ever know the real truth behind legacies and the illusory world of communication in our current age.

A book that needs to be discussed. A book that raises questions. A book that is also a brilliant story. Your emotions will be be pushed in all directions- the possible outcomes of human activity( fear for younger generations will emerge) the exploration of the lives of others resulting in deep empathy, compassion, dislike and possibly disgust.

You cannot rush this novel - deep immersion is needed.

A modern masterpiece- part one does push us into reflecting upon the world we live in today and the future( and it's hard reading)but it's part two that really propels this great novel into something special.

Highly recommended

[Ari Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down. Intriguing premise, flawed execution. What We Can Know dramatizes the limits of what even the most doggedly devoted biographers can reconstruct about the inner lives of their subjects, and the tensions between literary representations and historical reality.

The entirely fictional Francis Blundy was an English poet with a canonical standing that rivaled Seamus Heaney, and dedicated a cycle of 15 birthday sonnets (a corona) for his wife and muse Vivien at a literary star-studded dinner party in 2014, before the vellum they were inscribed upon vanished, never to be seen again. Blundy was a pedantic bore and insufferable boor, not to mention a global warming denier, and Vivien, who gave up on her own Oxbridge academic career, seems to have been walking paces behind him as his personal doormat and slavish housekeeper.

Fast-forward to 2119, when England has become an drowned archipelago of islands thanks to global heating, the middling literature professor Tom Metcalfe is obsessively searching for the text of the lost poem, reconstructing everything that can be known about that "immortal dinner" from digital scraps of decrypted emails and text messages. With his head stuck in the prediluvian past, he has only the slightest of toeholds in his own present, and his research agenda is an ever-deepening rabbit hole that alienates him from his contemporaries. His delusionally romantic over-identification with Vivien starts to undermine his relationship with his on-again/off-again partner Rose. Much to his chagrin, his university students have zero interest in the Great Derangement of the early 2000s, beyond incandescent rage at people of our own time who cooked the planet and carbonized the atmosphere.

It's no surprise that McEwan evocatively presents the repressed social world of posh, educated literary types in leafy Oxfordshire, and the smugness of literary one-upmanship. (I'm moderately confident that one minor character is a cruel parody of Rachel Cusk.)

Of course, the prose is lushly, addictively readable, and McEwan remotely detonates some landmines in the novel's second half, with a series of wrenching (if cheaply melodramatic) plot twists. I'll keep this as general as I can: we gasp as Vivien reveals herself as far more narcissistic and sociopathic than Tom could have ever imagined, and Blundy is a male art monster for the ages. While playful, the science fiction framing narrative suffers from thinly-imagined world-building, and the plot machinery creaks, clanks, and thuds.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

[Claire Fuller]

I love how whatever McEwan writes surprises me. He hasn't settled for a genre and like that he's still playing. It's about 100 years in the future, the seas have risen and in England only islands remain. Tom, an academic, is obsessed with a lost poem from about 2014 written by a famous poet for his wife, Vivian, whom he also obsesses over. The first part of the book is Tom's search both in remaining papers and then via an actual treasure hunt (I loved this bit especially), where Tom tries to piece together where the poem might be and what it is about. The second half is the true story, which I also really enjoyed, although none of it came as a revelation (maybe it wasn't supposed to). But of course, there is throughout the brilliant McEwan writing, and the easy story-telling. I really enjoyed this. Thanks to the publishers for the proof.

[Hanneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting to get presented with a view of our present world as envisaged by a literary scholar in 2119 who is specialised in early twenty-first century literature. I have to write a more elaborate review once the impact of this scholar’s obsessive research as well as the description of what is left of the world has sunken in.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

University scholar Tom Metcalfe is delving into archives, researching a lost poem. It’s a long and complex piece: two hundred and ten lines with a construction that demands that the last line of each verse (or sonnet) becomes the first line of the next, and that the final verse comprises the first line of each of those that preceded it. In this poem, known as a corona, the last verse also needs to make sense. Tom has access to reams of information and has accumulated boxes of material, but in truth, he really has no idea whether he’ll ever be able to discover this fabled piece.

The year is 2119, and the world has changed, the result of a man-made disaster. Climate change, nuclear war, and resultant tsunamis have caused massive waves to crash ashore across coastal areas of the Atlantic. In the years since the resultant chaos has caused the collapse of fossil fuel, the world’s population has halved, and many species of flora and fauna are no longer to be found. The UK is now an archipelago, and travel is difficult for Tom in this land of islands. He is frequently required to commute by ferry from his home, where he teaches, to the separate island where his records are kept and where he undertakes his research. It’s a somewhat onerous journey. Wider travel is considered to be more dangerous in this rather lawless place. Long-distance travel is virtually impossible.

The poem was written in 2014. Only one copy was made, and all records of its construction were reportedly destroyed. It was a gift from the poet, Francis Blundy, to his wife Vivien. Blundy read it aloud at Vivien’s 54th birthday party and presented the sole written copy to her. Only a small gathering of family and friends witnessed the reading. Records of this event are purely in the form of emails and personal messages exchanged subsequent to the party. No trace of the poem in written form has been found. One technological advance that might aid Tom is the fact that advances in quantum computing and mathematics have enabled access to information previously hidden due to encryption. He’s desperately hoping to find something in these messages that might at least hint that some remnant of the poem has survived.

In tracking Tom’s quest, a number of themes are explored, including:

The causes and longer term impacts of what is termed the Derangement (in essence the wilful choice to ignore the obvious signs that something had to be done to ensure the survival of the world as we know it).

The relationship between Francis Bundy and his wife, Vivien. Also, to a lesser extent, the relationship between Tom and his partner Rose.

Poetry, in general, it’s constructs and its relationship to written fiction and non-fiction.

The cast here is kept relatively small, and I liked that. In essence, other than the characters I’ve named above, the only other people of interest are the various attendees at the 2014 birthday party. In time, all are to feature in one way or another and what an interesting lot they are. Their interactions are an intricate web of conflict, ambition, desire, and duplicity.

As the story progresses, a dark side to the tale develops. There are lines here on life’s brevity, on pain and suffering - some of which stopped me in my tracks. But truly, all shades are here. The narrative is, on the face of it, a simple one. But there are hidden complexities, all masterfully controlled by McEwan. The writing truly is superb. It’s a book to immerse yourself in, to enjoy, and to learn from, with characters you’ll enjoy and remember. I doubt I’ll read anything to match it in a long while.

My thanks to Random House UK, Vintage for supplying a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Bobby · Rating 2 out of 5]

REMINDER TO SELF: A blurb is a marketing tool, and dag nab it, Bobby, just cuz you love the sound of the blurb don’t mean that you’ll love the da gum book!

I thought I'd told myself no mas being tricked by blurbz after I Who Have Never Known Men, my winner for the most overrated book of the century, but apparently not. In the immor(t)al words of the philosopher lil George Bush "fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again."

I must be from Tennessee because I done been fooled again.

P.S. Why did I read this whole book? That’s probably for my therapist and I to work out.

[Grazia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I nostri obblighi verso il futuro

In Quello che possiamo sapere, Ian McEwan racconta apparentemente la storia di Thomas Metcalfe, un accademico ossessionato da un episodio apparentemente minore: nel 2014 un celebre poeta recita una poesia a una cena privata, un testo che non verrà mai pubblicato né tramandato. Secoli dopo, Metcalfe cerca di rintracciare quel poema perduto, tentando di ricostruire la verità dietro quell’evento e di restituire voce a qualcosa che rischia di scomparire con il mondo che conosciamo.


"Un’opera letteraria, come un bambino, può impiegare molto tempo a guadagnarsi una vita del tutto indipendente. O può non guadagnarsela mai."

Il romanzo indaga il fragile legame tra passato e presente, mostrando quanto sia difficile conoscere davvero ciò che è accaduto nella vita degli altri e quanto la storia ufficiale, con le sue categorie rigide, sappia spesso svuotare di emozione ciò che è stato vissuto in prima persona.

McEwan mette in luce la tensione tra memoria vissuta e documentazione, tra ciò che ricordiamo e ciò che il tempo trasforma in leggenda.


"La memoria è una spugna. Assorbe materiale da un altro tempo e da altri luoghi e lo lascia sgocciolare sul momento in questione."

Questo tema mi ha toccata da vicino: osservo mia mamma che, invecchiando, tende a negare ciò che non le rende onore, ricostruendo gli eventi non per come sono stati, ma per come avrebbe voluto che fossero. È un meccanismo umano e fragile: se non si scrive il passato, esso si trasforma in una versione desiderata, più comoda, ma meno vera. Scrivere, ricordare con onestà, significa forse consegnare al futuro ciò che non abbiamo il coraggio di ammettere nel presente, sperando che importi a qualcuno.


"Il senso di colpa è un sentimento adattabile. Può convivere tranquillamente con emozioni piú felici, chiedendo solo di essere placato o sradicato da un gesto gentile."

Leggere questo romanzo ha smosso qualcosa anche in me. Una cara amica ha osservato che il mio modo di leggere è analitico, preciso, quasi uno studiare più che lasciarsi andare — frutto della mia formazione. Ma quando un libro riesce a scalfire questa impalcatura, trascinando nell’emotività nonostante l’istinto di osservare e sezionare, allora vuol dire che quel libro ha dei numeri. E McEwan, qui, li ha tutti.

"La sola esistenza che un’opera letteraria poteva avere albergava nelle menti dei suoi lettori – nonché, si sarebbe dovuto aggiungere, di coloro che ne avevano sentito parlare."

Un romanzo che invita a interrogarsi su chi eravamo, su come ci raccontiamo e su ciò che davvero lasciamo in eredità.

"su ciò di cui non si può sapere, si deve tacere"

[Ayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Brilliant. Grand. Conceptually breathtaking. Structurally flawed.

Reading this book did something to me - or rather, in me. It made me feel part of something vast: a microorganism in a long chain of generations, where my day-to-day, seemingly gibberish movements matter deeply, even if they are easily overlooked or forgotten by those who come after us. It tapped me on the shoulder and said: hey! you are sun - and hey you are dust. Only fiction can attempt to hold this kind of contradiction,and McEwan does exactly that, gripping the pen with a craft honed for a lifetime.

One thing McEwan does exceptionally well here is remind us that no event exists in isolation. How the geopolitical is inseparable from the personal. How climate change is not abstract - it is intimate diffusing into a love story. How work shapes life. How celebrity is ordinariness wrapped in blindness. But what can we know?
What We Can Know is both a question and, ironically, an answer: what we can know is what is revealed, while so much else remains concealed. Perception vs. reality.

The novel opens in 2119. Much of the Americas and the United Kingdom lie underwater. Nigeria is a global superpower that controls the internet. The naira is the world’s currency. There has been progress, stagnation, and regression - especially in contrast to earlier predictions about generative AI. Communities are less diverse. The future is neither utopia nor apocalypse, but something eerily recognizable.

Within this world, McEwan chooses not to write a sweeping political epic. Instead, he narrows his focus to the personal: an art professor obsessed with a long-lost poem, The Corona for Vivien; its author, Francis Blundy; and Vivien, the woman for whom it was written in 2014. The novel is divided into two parts. The first follows the professor’s life, love affairs, and research into the poem. What struck me most here was how future generations might perceive us - our arrogance, our certainty, our blindness.

One passage that resonated with me:

“I was a parasite, an intruder on the intentions and achievements of people who lived in another world more than a hundred years ago. They would not care for or about me if I had lived then or if they had lived now. If I met them I probably wouldn’t like them. I wouldn’t like they thought they lived on a historical summit with a privileged all round view, when in fact they were crouching a low extinction’s alp.

They were shaped and trapped by their times, their material circumstances, their expectations as I was by mine. We were flies confined in separate bottles.”

Equally striking is how McEwan anticipates - and answers - a quiet readerly question: why poetry? Why should a poem matter amid catastrophe more than 100 years from now?

“World wide disease, famine, drought, unprecedented mass migrations, no one had time for poetry or any other cultural endeavor. Survival was the only dream, which many did not fulfill. Between then and now, our numbers fell from 9 to 4 billion but still in our calmer or more abound 22nd century, a corona for Vivien remains precious for those who care, a talisman to the survivors under promise for a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet.”

I loved this.

The second part shifts back to 2014 and centers on Vivien herself and the events surrounding The Corona. The first-person narration here reminded me slightly of the voice in Claire Leslie Hall’s Broken Country(which I didn’t like if you were wondering), but with more breadth, density, flesh and bones. Vivien is sharply drawn, making questionable choices, yet speaking with the authority of someone who understands the cost of them.

I found the two-part structure strange. Much of the criticism I have come across around this book focuses on the slow beginning, and I agree that a chapter-by-chapter parallel unfolding across centuries might have strengthened momentum. I’m not entirely convinced the delayed focus on Vivien serves the novel as well as it could have. If I were writing it, I would have structured it differently.

Still - I loved the heart of this book. It feels urgent without being preachy. Small in entry, expansive in meaning. You start reading unsure what it’s really about, and then it dawns on you: What we can know is the theming overlap- like concentric circles in a Venn diagram - between perception and reality, longtermism, climate change, the future, ownership of one’s story, and the enduring power of art and poetry. None of it is forced. McEwan lets these themes unfolds the way life does.

This was my first McEwan - and it won’t be my last. I moved it to the top of my TBR after seeing it on Barack Obama’s December 2025 list. It was absolutely worth it.








Favorite Quotes (Apart from ones mentioned earlier):

“It was believed by insiders that Mary kept her novel sexless to guard her privacy.”

“Guilt is an accommodating emotion. It can sit comfortably alongside happier feelings, asking only to be softened or eradicated by a kind act.”

“I occasionally fantasized about an enchanted life on a couch, doing nothing but reading - reading and sex. Perfect bed fellows.”

“In him I had a partner and a playmate but I also wanted a thought mate.”

“I began to worry about the future of my journals after I was dead. . . At the end of my life I might not have the strength to destroy an extended record of myself. But if I was going to destroy it, no point writing it. Subtly my journals were becoming a report of a better self. I would have denied it but over time the entry seize to be private. I had a reader in mind. “

“Grief is a dream state. The linear markers of ordinary time and daily obligations are wrenched apart. Most significant ties lead to the recent past, to a sudden absence and to a struggle of what could or should have been . There’s a sameness to the days which accelerates their passing and a sameness in the pattern of memories that makes them unbearable even if they must be visited again and again.”

“You don’t understand the natural world. You can’t convince how it’s threatened.”

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5]

Ian McEwan may be on the upper end of his 70s, but his writing is certainly not geriatric. He hit the sweet spot with this one, in his dual timelines of 2119 and 2014, weaving a literary detective novel with cli-fi and subversive romance. Part One was slow and cerebral, but the state of the world was intriguing, as well as the mystery of the missing poem. There’s plenty plenty of catastrophes—floods, disease, hunger, nuclear calamity, to name a few. Part I starts in the future, 2119, after the warned-of but largely ignored crises have altered the world we live in. The UK is now an archipelago, the US is beset with fighting warlords, there’s no more air travel (except the military), and people survive mostly on protein cakes made of carbon and soil bacteria. Thankfully, the internet was saved by Nigeria, where all recorded archives are now stored. Every email, text message, journal entry, chronicle, or written article about someone is accessible. Does that mean we can know everything about someone else?

Foodie experiences have perished; I mention that because the major set piece is in the past, in 2014, where a classy barn-turned-private dinner salon of literary hotshots and a celebrity poet, Francis Blundy (whose home this is), is the central nugget of the story, where all vectors proceed. The irony of the sweet and savory night is such a contrast to the diet of 2119. Another layered irony is how McEwan is able to create nostalgia for the time we live in now, as we are reading!

Thomas Metcalf, the protagonist of Part One, is a relatable humanities academic who, in 2019, is trying to untangle the clues to a lost or hidden poem of 2014—a set of 15 sonnets, each stanza starting with the last line of the previous one. The corona is called A Corona for Vivien, which Blundy wrote and read aloud to his wife and private party on the night of Viben’s 54th birthday. There is no other copy. Francis gave the only copy to Vivien, and 100+ years later, a certain breed of academic is still hunting this elusive poem down empty trails and rabbit holes. Ironic that everything that Francis and Vivien wrote--text messages, emails, journals, social media—it’s all saved. And this is what the central theme is all about. Is the truth recorded? Can we get at the truth of something if we mine all that they put down in writing?

“It was reckless to invade this dream buried in a century-long sleep. I was here to disturb phantoms...That these literary ghosts were my own creations, conjured by library archive, made them more forbidding.”

Thomas pursues a potential clue to the hidden poem and enlists help from his on and off again lover, Rose, also an academic, but weary of Thomas’ obsession of Vivien. Anyone who knows Thomas well would realize that he is more in love with the long-dead Vivien that he never met than he is anyone alive—even possibly, more than he loves Rose. Is it the time period he yearns for? McEwan explores that, especially through the eloquent prose of Part I. The poem itself is rumored to have been bought for a hefty fee by a climate-denier /annihilator corporation. Blundy is so famous and successful that his views on climate and nature preservation in the poem may penetrate the zeitgeist and cause a swelling of support.

The reader should not know beforehand who narrates Part Two, when we are back in time to 2014. The prose in this section is told with megawatt and light-hearted brilliance (until it gets sinister), a sound juxtaposition from the passive and sometimes heavy narrative of Part One. It’s a gift, this part of the book. A reward from the almost bleak digestion of Part One. The cerebral, intellectual former Booker winner lets go in the final section and pulls off a web of romance, intrigue, secret entanglements, violent crime, deceit, betrayal, and more! Only a writer of his clout could do what he did---start with a serious and heavy new order of the world (that the masses accept in stride), and then move to a life the reader will miss, despite the fact that we’re pretty much in it now. I almost cried for the past until realizing that the book’s past is the reader’s present. Well, not exactly, because ten years ago we thought we had it good.

I won’t divulge except to say that the finale is absolutely satisfying and inevitable. The end of Part One—the last few sentences, is what I call a "fuckyou" moment, a bit twee for thee. But of the end of Part Two, all I could say was “fuck ME!”

A big thanks to Book Browse and Knopf for sending me a copy for review.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bello, bello, bello. È, tra le tante cose, un omaggio alla complessità dei rapporti umani e l’ennesima testimonianza che la cosa più vera a riguardo l’ha scritta il più grande di tutti: “capire bene la gente non è vivere”.

[Valerie Book Valkyrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Full Body Dry Heave Stars (set to music).
Trigger Alert: the following review contains foul language, naked revelation, a bilious take-down, & some dreadful dancing and may not be suitable for those with delicate sensibilities.

Catalogued as Science Fiction, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction (as well as LitFic, Fantasy, & HistFic) and described as "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."

This quoted description brings to mind musings of the works of Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, John Wyndam, Richard Matheson and other greats (or at the very least, Cormac McCarthy)
in the SF subgenres of Dystopian and Speculative Fiction.

The premise is promising: set (mostly) in the future, in 2119, in a UK partially submerged by rising seas, the story is centred on Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the fictional University of the South Downs, who is investigating a lost poem, specifically a Corona dedicated to the poet's wife, read aloud at a party in 2014.
Note: a Corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close. Coronas are usually very lengthy endeavors.

There's the ubiquitous ⛎ as Tom Metcalf becomes entrenched in his research:
"Our clean sea, its turtles & schools of dolphins, its vast beds of gently undulating sea grasses are never enough when I know that in 2025 people swam in seas whose cold depths contained cod, mackerel, hake, shad & sprat, pollock & scores of other extinct fish whose muscular names are known only to a few. I have one foot in the past, perhaps two. I live there, in 2014 or 2025, not here." pg 109

There's even an unexpected mystery twist in the last quarter that could have catapulted this professed SF, Dystopian, Speculative Fic novel to a five star rating however MUCH alterity arose, including but not limited to:

#1. Sci Fi - What Flummery! If this can be catalogued as SF then, surely, The Day of the Triffids could be catalogued as a Gardening Manual, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? could easily go in the catalogue as a Judeo-Christian Dining Guide!

#2. Dystopian - My A$$! You may as well file The Remains of the Day, The Lincoln Highway, and North Woods in the Dystopian subgenre as well!
AND all three, each in their own unique style, are very well written which brings us to #3.

#3. Execution - the unfolding of this professed SF, Dystopian, SpecFic, LitFic, Fantasy, HistFic novel most closely resembled a Harlequin Romance minus the actual bodice ripping. The entangled and entrenched contents of Part 2 of the novel even wandered into 1980's soap opera territory graced with titles akin to As The Worm Turns or The Brazen & The Bashful (aka The Bold and The Beautiful, you can watch original episodes, if that's your schtik, for free here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...)

This was my first dance with Ian McEwan and much to my dismay it was a lot like dancing with Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) of Seinfeld series fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsl3I... 🧚‍♀️🙋🏼!

[sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

if the main character had exploded and died, i would have given this five stars. oh well

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens in 2119, where Tom, a weary academic, sets out for the Bodleian Snowdonia Library, a fortress of paper perched in the mountains like a shrine to human stubbornness.

He is hunting traces of Francis Blundy, a poet who declared himself the torchbearer of English verse, and of Vivien, the wife who abandoned a promising scholarly career to run his household and manage his ego. Tom is also preoccupied with a notorious literary rumor: that Blundy once composed a coronet of sonnets for Vivien during a legendary dinner, a poem that promptly disappeared.

The archive yields fragments rather than certainties. Vivien's journals record her shopping lists, her cooking plans, her irritation with the climate, and her resignation to Francis's demanding presence. Between the notes on potatoes and quail, she slips in confessions that hint at unease.

Francis himself comes through in drafts and lectures as a man thrilled by his own voice, a performer of verse who saw no reason to lend his hand to mundane tasks.

The so-called “Second Immortal Dinner” of 2014 becomes the centerpiece. Guests arrive bearing more baggage than their overnight bags: affairs half-concealed, marriages tottering, professional envy simmering. The evening promised quail and conviviality but carried enough tension to keep a playwright in business for years.

At the heart of it all was Francis with his poem, a lavish sonnet sequence composed on vellum and presented as both gift and monument. Yet the text itself slips from history, leaving behind speculation, reverence, and scholarly bickering.

Tom narrates from the vantage point of a future where seas have risen, politics have fractured, and the humanities cling on like moss in the cracks of ruined stone. His own entanglements with his colleague Rose mirror the dynamics of the Blundys: rivalry disguised as affection, affection disguised as rivalry. Their partnership adds a modern echo to the older story, suggesting that human relationships remain just as fraught whether one is peeling potatoes in 2014 or cataloguing archives in 2119.

The novel builds on this interplay of timelines, voices, and documents. It revels in the absurdity of scholars chasing meaning through trivial minutiae while ignoring the larger collapses around them. The vanished poem matters less than the way its absence becomes a stage for ambition, nostalgia, and vanity.

McEwan has written a novel that behaves like an academic conference after too much wine: brilliant, pedantic, petty, and unexpectedly moving.

What We Can Know skewers our appetite for gossip about writers while slyly admitting that gossip is often more nourishing than the work itself. It toys with the line between scholarship and voyeurism, turning the reader into a complicit biographer rifling through someone else's laundry basket.

At its best, the book is a satire of cultural memory, a lament for domestic sacrifice, and a reminder that genius is usually a joint production, though only one name ends up engraved in anthologies. Whether the lost poem existed or not is beside the point; the real achievement lies in exposing the vanity of literary mythmaking and the quiet tragedies that get buried beneath it.

For a reader today, with archives digitized and reputations inflated by algorithms, this satire feels less like prediction and more like autobiography for an age addicted to self-display.


"... I began an aimless browsing around the store. My mood was beginning to dip. Almost every book whose title I read, I wanted to read and knew I never would. The cumulative effect of seeing the results of so much labour, researching, composing, revising, doubting, defending then hoping, was spreading an ache of weariness through my limbs. Lingering jet lag, surely. By my body’s uncertain clock, I had been up since 3 a.m. A silly slogan repeated itself in my thoughts: too many books is like too much chocolate. The bookshop air that had seemed so fragrant was now insufficient and stifling. I thought I could fall asleep on my feet. I wanted to leave but I did not have the will. They seemed in league, these busy ambitious authors, striving to teach, frighten or entertain me. To lie down on the floor was tempting. I would not have minded the creaking bare oak boards. People could step over me for all I cared. But I kept upright and arrived at a table, a restored kitchen table, of new hardback history books. It was an act of self-punishment to read the titles. An illustrated history of silk, of the 1944 Battle of Hürtgen Forest, of the valve flute, of the thirteen Chinese dynasties, of children’s furniture, ofmental disorders. The past was as monstrously heaped and oppressive as the books about it. I was too weak to face it or them. There was too much of everything..."

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ian McEwan stelde me nog nooit teleur en ook deze keer niet. Aanvankelijk, tijdens de opbouw van het eerste deel, dacht ik zelfs dat hij na Lessons opnieuw een topper geschreven had. In dat eerste deel creëert hij een mogelijke wereld over 100 jaar en dat is niet meteen iets om vrolijk van te worden. Meesterlijk gedoseerd laat hij doorsijpelen hoe het Verenigd Koninkrijk (en de rest van de wereld) anno 2120 in de beschreven toestand (die ik niet wil spoilen) verzeild is geraakt.

Veel is verloren gegaan, maar we maken ook kennis met Tom Metcalfe, een toekomstige literatuurhistoricus gespecialiseerd in wat de periode 90-30 wordt genoemd, kortom: onze tijd van ongeveer 1990 tot 2030. Nog meer dan nu het geval is komt zijn vakgebied in de verdringing door het zogenaamde belang van de exacte wetenschappen. Hoe geobsedeerd hij ook is door wat er in onze tijd bestond aan mogelijkheden, vrijheid en overvloed, zowel materieel als biologisch, zijn studenten krijgt hij moeilijk warm. Zij kijken liever vooruit dan terug en zien hem als een ouderwetse nostalgicus.

Toms obsessie vindt al jaren haar brandpunt in zijn studie van Francis Blundy, zowat de beroemdste Britse dichter van begin 21e eeuw en meerbepaald zijn queeste naar een nooit teruggevonden gedicht van de man; een sonnettenkrans die hij schreef als liefdes- en verjaardagsgeschenk voor zijn vrouw met als titel 'Corona for Vivien'. Vivien is voor Tom niet alleen de spilfiguur van zijn onderzoek, maar ook een onbereikbare geliefde. Hij denkt haar te kunnen doorgronden door alle persoonlijke informatie die hij via het (Nigeriaanse!) internet en andere geschriften weet te achterhalen. Het gedicht ontdekken zou voor hem een boost betekenen voor zijn carrière en mogelijk ook voor zijn lastige liefdesrelatie met zijn collega Rose. Samen ondernemen ze een avontuurlijke expeditie in een ultieme poging om het gedicht te vinden.

En als die expeditie haar beslag vindt, op ongeveer 2/3 van de roman, laat Ian McEwan de toekomst voor wat ze is en geeft hij de Vivien uit de 21e eeuw het woord. In dat tweede deel leren we de ware feiten kennen en toegegeven, die werden al snel voorspelbaar. De spanningsboog bleef niet overeind en dat is jammer, hoe helder en goed bedacht ook de plot.

Het boeiendst aan 'What we can know' was voor mij dan ook de blik die Ian McEwan ons biedt vanuit een mogelijke, niet zo aangename toekomst. Nog meer dan gewoonlijk zat ik in onze tuin naar de (al verminderde) biodiversiteit te kijken, dacht ik aan hoe het leven van onze kinderen zal verlopen, aan wat er in de wereld gaande is momenteel. Zaken die we stilaan beginnen te beseffen, die we intussen kunnen weten, maar niet willen zien of genegeerd worden door zij die de macht hebben en die kost wat kost willen behouden.

En ja, hoe pijnlijk en schrijnend ook dat toekomstbeeld, de auteur geeft ons toch enige hoop mee: want er zal altijd nog ruimte zijn voor liefde, menselijkheid, natuurschoon en dromen. Wat we kunnen weten hoeft dus niet allemaal negatief te klinken. Een troostende gedachte. Mijn McEwan-normen in acht nemend, kan ik deze goed begonnen en knap geschreven roman echter niet meer dan 3,5* geven.

[Tini · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can we ever really know?

In 2014, a beloved English poet presents a poem - a corona of fifteen sonnets titled "A Corona for Vivien"- to his wife in the company of their friends and family. Though it is read aloud at that dinner party, the poem is never published, and the only existing, handwritten copy never seen or heard again by anyone outside those present that evening.

In 2119, surprisingly, our world still exists, though in a somewhat altered state. The UK is partly submerged by rising seas, and "A Corona for Vivien" has become the stuff of legend: for some, a vital cultural artifact, its assumed content a rallying cry for various causes; for others both "a repository of dreams" and "a mirror for the ages and all their anxieties". So thinks Tom Metcalfe, a scholar poring over the archives of the long-dead poet, his wife, and their dinner guests in hopes of a glimpse of that poem, going through all the available resources left behind by those in attendance at its one and only reading: their journals, e-mails, and social media. Along the way, Tom is confronted with the limits of what fragments can reveal, and what remains unknowable.

"'A Corona for Vivien' remains precious to those who care, a talisman to the survivors and a promise of a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet."

"What We Can Know" confronts our fascination with famous figures and our yearning for an idealized past that never was. The result is a beautifully written exploration of memory, identity, and how we reconstruct lives from what survives. Much like history is written by the victors, the exploration of our present - viewed from a not-so-distant future - is shaped less by what truly happened and more by what traces are left behind, who controls the narrative, the archives, and the lenses through which memory is preserved.

I hugely admire Ian McEwan for conjuring two distinctive, wholly unique voices for the novel’s two time periods. While I admittedly struggled through some of the first part, with Tom's chapters sometimes feeling overextended and navel-gazing while also not moving the story forward quickly enough, the second part flowed more naturally, challenging Tom’s assumptions and offering more nuance than I expected.

The premise - searching for meaning and answers amid what’s lost - delivers a thought-provoking, sometimes unsettling result. "What We Can Know" isn’t just speculative in its future setting; it’s asking uncomfortable questions about our present. How well we can ever truly know people, places, and moments, when we have only fragments to guide us? And what do we leave behind, willingly or otherwise?

Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

"What We Can Know" was published on September 23, 2025, and is available now.