Set in 2119, What We Can Know imagines a world reshaped by war and climate disaster, where humanity survives on scattered islands and cultural memory is fragile. Thomas Metcalfe, a humanities scholar, becomes obsessed with a long-lost poem read once in 2014 and never seen again. Through dense archives, shifting narrators, and a dramatic second-half turn, Ian McEwan explores nostalgia, digital excess, and the uneasy question at the novel’s core: what can we really know about t
