What Can We Know by Ian McEwan

New York Times Bestseller. Booker Prize–winning author. Two facts that should have you reaching for this book before you’ve even read another word.

From the celebrated mind behind Atonement and Saturday comes a genre-bending novel that slips between centuries like sea mist through a harbor — quiet, inevitable, and impossible to ignore. A candlelit dinner in 2014. A poem read aloud, then lost to history. And one hundred years later, a waterlogged world haunted by everything it has surrendered to the rising tides.

This is a book about what we leave behind — in words, in love, in crime — and what future generations make of the fragments we drop. It is a literary detective story, a romance, a post-apocalyptic meditation, and a deeply human question wrapped in elegant prose: can we ever truly know anything?

Critics have been effusive. The New York Times called it “a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” The Washington Post praised its “brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted” structure. The Wall Street Journal simply called McEwan “a novelist of consummate skill.” Hard to argue.

This is the kind of novel you’ll want to read slowly — the kind that rewards lingering, the way a good walk along the Marginal Way rewards patience. Let the pages pull you in.

• Genre-spanning: literary fiction, romance, science fiction, and mystery
• New York Times Bestseller
• From the Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement

A masterpiece for readers who love stories that think.

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