WHAT WE CAN KNOW

by Ian McEwan

This work of meticulous shimmering intellect doesn’t just sit in your hands, it sits in your mind. Set a century into the future, the narrative looks back on our own era with a haunting analytical distance. It explores a world reshaped by the catastrophic reality of global warming, where the map of human morality has been redrawn by rising tides and the fractured politics of survival. McEwan’s prose is both sharp and graceful, turning the existential threat of climate change into a backdrop for a quiet, devastating study of human limitation. The book’s cleverness lies in how it folds these high-concept philosophical problems—the failure of political will and the breakdown of objective truth—into the smallest, most intimate domestic moments. He explores how we might still seek connection or hold onto a sense of self when the structures of the past have dissolved. A book of quiet tensions and immense intellectual reach, eschewing grand gestures for the profound impact of a single, shared secret.