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Ian McEwan’s 2025 novel What We Can Know is a literary mystery set across two moments: a 2014 dinner where a poem is read and then lost, and 2119, when a scholar in a flooded England tries to recover it and finds a crime. Resentment and revenge run through the story, but McEwan himself describes the book as a study of history, knowledge, love and survival, not as a novel about climate policy.
What the novel is about
The story opens in 2014 at a dinner where the fictional poet Francis Blundy reads “A Corona for Vivien,” a poem dedicated to his wife. The poem’s text is never recovered, and it becomes a subject of speculation for later generations. The US publisher’s description places the search for it in 2119, when much of the western world has been submerged after a catastrophic nuclear accident.
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The protagonist is Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar living in the waterlogged south of what used to be England. He studies archives from the early twenty-first century and follows a clue toward the lost poem. The investigation does not stay literary. It exposes entangled loves and a brutal crime, and it undermines Metcalfe’s confidence in what he thought he knew about the people around the poet and about the period itself.
How the two timelines work
The novel alternates between two fixed points, and the reader is asked to hold both at once:
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- 2014, the dinner. The poem is performed in a social setting, and its existence is the seed of everything that follows. The novel treats the reading as a moment that cannot be checked again.
- 2119, the investigation. Metcalfe reads early twenty-first-century records and tries to reconstruct a private event from fragments. Each document he finds complicates the story rather than settling it.
The UK publisher frames the same structure and describes Britain in 2119 as a set of archipelagos after rising seas. Its synopsis calls the novel “a quest, a literary thriller and a love story,” a combination that matches how the book reads: the investigation drives the plot, while the past relationships supply the emotional stakes.
Resentment and vengeance: where the title points
The title foregrounds resentment and vengeance, and the author’s own list of subjects names revenge directly. In his official novel description, McEwan writes that the book contains “a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry.” He also describes its underlying theme as “how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.”
Rank #2
Resentment is less clearly labelled in McEwan’s own wording than revenge, so readers should treat it as the title’s emphasis rather than a term the author uses to describe the book. What the text does show is a crime and a set of relationships in which old grievances keep resurfacing across the century between the poem and the scholar.
Is it science fiction?
McEwan’s official page describes the novel as “science fiction without the science.” That phrase is useful, because the future England is a setting rather than an extrapolation. The book does not explain how the catastrophe unfolded in technical detail, and it asks the reader to accept the changed world as given.
Rank #3
The publisher categories assign the book to literary fiction, science fiction and romance, and critics and publishers also use the phrase “literary thriller.” McEwan gives his own reason for the framing in a statement describing the novel as “a novel about history, and what we can know of it, and of each other.”
The future setting should not be read as a forecast. In an AP report from September 2025, McEwan said he wanted the changed climate to work as a given in the story and said the novel is not really about climate change as an issue. AP also reports that he framed the book as an effort “to look at the present through the rather envious eyes of someone in the future,” and that the future scholar regards the present as a time of abundance and natural diversity. AP’s account includes a period called “The Derangement” and a large population-loss figure. Both belong to the novel’s imagined world and are not real-world statistics.
Rank #4
Editions and formats
Both main publishers list physical editions. The details below are the publisher-listed values; check the publisher or a retailer for current stock and prices.
| Market | Publisher and format | Publication date | Pages | ISBN | Listed price | Other formats listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Knopf hardcover | September 23, 2025 | 320 | 9780593804728 | Not stated in the publisher listing reviewed | Paperback (listed for June 16, 2026); large-print (448 pages); ebook |
| United Kingdom | Jonathan Cape hardback | September 18, 2025 | 320 | 9781787335738 | £22.00 | 2026 paperback; 2025 ebook and audio download |
Because the two markets have different publication dates and formats, a title search should include the edition and territory, such as “What We Can Know by Ian McEwan” with “paperback” or “Knopf,” to avoid confusing the US and UK releases.
Best Value
How reviewers have read it
The publisher-quoted reviews do not agree on what matters most. One emphasis is the plot and the lost poem; another is the novel’s interest in human knowledge; a third is its climate backdrop; and a fourth is the way it combines campus fiction with postapocalyptic fiction. These are individual readings from the named publications, not a consensus verdict.
Who the novel suits
- Readers who want a mystery first. The lost poem and the crime drive the plot, so the future setting works as the frame for the investigation.
- Readers interested in archives and unreliable assumptions. Metcalfe’s reading of old records is the core of the book, and it rewards close attention.
- Readers who want a serious crime and relationship plot. The brutal crime is not decorative; it changes how the earlier relationships look.
- Readers who prefer character to world-building. The future England is detailed enough to be strange, but the emotional weight sits with Metcalfe and the people he is trying to understand.
Readers who expect a sustained argument about climate policy, or a technical account of the catastrophe, will find the book is organised around other questions.
The Bottom Line
Read What We Can Know as a literary mystery set against a catastrophic future. The lost poem, the crime and the scholar’s changing view of the past carry the book, and the setting serves that investigation.
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