What We Can Know is the 18th novel by author Ian McEwan published in 2025 by Jonathan Cape,[1] set almost a century in the future in a UK partially submerged by rising seas.
[2] The book is centered on Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the fictional University of the South Downs investigating a lost poem, read aloud in 2014.
[3] McEwan has described the book as a work of science fiction “without the science.
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