What We Can Know

by

Hardcover, 320 pages

English language

Published Sept. 18, 2025

View on Inventaire

(1 review)

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, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

1 edition

reviewed What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Estupenda novela postapocaliptica

Según Vallejo el autor-narrador omnipresente es un recurso barato y artificial, en la vida real no sabemos todo de nada. Luego el escribe en primera persona.

Aquí Ewan hace algo parecido. Comienza por describir el trabajo de unos eruditos en literatura,que desde su desconocimiento de la realidad de nuestro tiempo tratan de hipoterizar sobre un poema perdido en el tiempo y las consecuencias de la crisis climática.

No se si catalogarlo como solarpunk. Tal vez es solo postapocaliptico.

Alrededor de la historia del poema conocemos a su autor, que termina siendo un tipo embelesado de su tlento. Y la "musa", al final el personaje más complejo y completo de la historia.

Sin duda uno de los mejores libros de la década.