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What We Can Know

ISBN 
9781787335745
Format 
Trade Paperback
Recommended Price 
R395.00
Published 
October 2025
About the book: 
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, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
 
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
 
A quest, a literary thriller and a love story,  What We Can Know  is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
Other titles by this author 
About the Author

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories,  First Love, Last Rites,  won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include  The Child in Time,  which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award;  The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam,  which won the 1998 Booker Prize;  Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me,  which was a number-one bestseller.  Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act  and  On Chesil Beach  have all been adapted for the big screen.

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