Buried treasure, murder, apocalypse, and a love story.

Some are calling it McEwan's best novel since Atonement.

It’s the 22^nd Century, and Britain has been broken up into an archipelago as a result of the ‘inundation.’ Thomas Metcalfe, literary scholar, is in search of a famous lost poem written for, and dedicated to, a woman named Vivien. He studies Vivien’s journals and email records written a hundred years before his time looking for clues that might help trace the poem. In the process, he becomes more than a little infatuated by some romanticised notion of this woman, Vivien. Part two of the novel is set in our time, and we are now with Vivien as first person protagonist. Much of what Thomas Metcalfe’s investigation had seemingly uncovered about her is then proven to be flawed. Vivien’s life; her hopes, lusts, and ambitions, propel the second half of the story. We get to know the fleshed-out character that the scholar, for all his meticulous research could only ever speculate on – hence the title: ‘What We Can Know.’ McEwan explores a post-apocalyptic world where sea levels have risen, life expectancy has dropped, the internet is fractured, likewise the world’s manufacturing industries. Oh, and there’s a murder, intricate plot twists, and intrigues aplenty. The writing, with McEwan’s trademark precision, gleams on every page. Here’s Thomas Metcalfe, looking back from the ravaged world of Britain in the 22^nd century, thinking about all that has been squandered:

‘…the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved. When too few understood how sublime their natural and man-made worlds were.’

A perfect world lost, then, like the precious lost poem the scholar is sifting through historical archives in an effort to find.