What We Can Know by Ian Mcewan
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 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.ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It's a sophisticated entertainment of a high order." --The New York Times
"Brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted."--The Washington Post * "A novelist of consummate skill."--The Wall Street Journal * "Elegantly structured and provocative."--Los Angeles Times
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.
Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including The Children Act, Sweet Tooth, Solar, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, On Chesil Beach, Saturday, and Atonement, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W.H. Auden Award.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780593804728 |
| ISBN 10 | 0593804724 |
| Title | What We Can Know |
| Author | Ian Mcewan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Year published | 2025-09-23 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |