What We Can Know McEwan Ian (2025)

In 2014, a great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has ever been found. In 2119, the lowlands of the United Kingdom have been submerged by rising seas, and those who survive are haunted by the richness of the lost world. Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs in one of Britains remaining island archipelagos, studies the archives of that distant era, fascinated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he discovers a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story emerges of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately. What We Can Know reclaims the present from the sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world in which all is not quite lost.