What We Can Know

It is 2119, and climate change and nuclear war have ensured that, in Britain, only the hilltops are above sea level. An academic is obsessively researching a missing poem from 2014, which he thinks of as having been written in a golden age. With every e-mail, app message and other text that people from then saved to the cloud being available to him, he thinks he understands it all. But then he makes a discovery that takes him on a dangerous journey and turns all his ideas on their head. Many reviewers regard this as Ian McEwan’s best novel for years. On the surface, it is a novel warning of the impending effects of climate change, but it is also about the unknowable truths behind every historical fact and the limitations of memory and seemingly objective records. While the book is quite literary, its plot and characters carry you along.