What We Can Know

A Novel

De: Ian McEwan

Narrado por: David Rintoul, Rachel Bavidge

From the Booker prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.

2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he 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 elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, 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.

©2025 Ian McEwan (P)2025 Knopf Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A]s McEwan’s own literary prowess goes, [What We Can Know] shows him at the top of his game. In What We Can Know, McEwan completely captures readers with his marvelous writing—painting moods, settings, and descriptions to whet just about any literary appetite. His characters are complex and flawed. His story structure of searching for the past (our present) via a narrator of the future is intriguing, creative, and brilliant.”—LitReactor

“What We Can Know immerses us—aptly enough—in an apocalyptic future in which much of the UK is under water, but this mise-en-scène just as nimbly pivots to a story of scholarly, literary and romantic obsession, all varieties of doggedness McEwan has previously probed. . . . Present too, is a sensitively performed air of melancholy and loss, both in Tom’s pursuit of a literary-critical grail and in the ecological catastrophe that surrounds him. With these elements combining to make this an ambitious and accomplished work of fiction, it’s a rewarding and thought-provoking [read].”—Financial Times