Ian McEwan ~  What We Can Know

What We Can Know, the epic new novel from Ian McEwan, will be published on 18 September 2025. 

Ian McEwan says of his new novel: 

"What We Can Know is science fiction without the science. This is a novel about history, and what we can know of it, and of each other. We live our lives between the dead and the yet to be born. Of the dead we know a little, but not as much as we think. About the present, we disagree fiercely. People of the future, of course, are beyond our reckoning, but we’re troubled by what we’ll bequeath them. As they look back at us, what will our descendants think, when they contemplate the diminished world we left them? They might envy us. 

"To catch at these thoughts, I’ve written a novel about a quest, a crime, 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 somehow. In our times, we know more about the world than we ever did, and such knowledge will be hard to erase. Our great great grandchildren will scrape through and we won’t be around to count the cost or take the blame. My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time."

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2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 

2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. 

Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. 

What We Can Know is a masterpiece that spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going. 

In the words of Ian McEwan, it is a novel about: ‘a quest, a crime, 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 somehow.’ 

Pre-order copies in the United States or Canada.

Signed copies are available to preorder in the UK through Waterstones.

 

Ian McEwan and George Monbiot in Conversation

From the How To Academy: Join Ian McEwan and George Monbiot for a celebration of the extraordinary tenacity of the human spirit and a journey to a climate-ravaged Britain where all is not quite lost.

Don’t miss this exclusive conversation between Britain’s foremost environmental activist and its most distinguished novelist as they explore love, loss, survival, the life of the artist and the power of literature in the face of climate breakdown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Ian McEwan:

Ian 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). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.

In 2006, Ian McEwan 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. Solar won The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2010 and Sweet Tooth won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012. Ian McEwan was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2014 he was awarded the Bodleian Medal.