What We Can Know

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big ideas novel, all conveyed in McEwan’s trim, beautifully ordered sentences

Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times

An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking

Financial Times

[A] dazzling novel… [What We Can Know] has an eloquent fury about the way our misguided present is allowing nature to shrivel by "slow roasting"

Independent

McEwan’s arrestingly relevant new novel… [is] a fiercely involving biblio-mystery deepened by musings on knowledge and understanding, time and memory

Mail on Sunday

A gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt

Observer

An enjoyable work… McEwan excels at exploiting narrative details for dramatic effect

Literary Review

A big, unabashed crowd-pleaser… What We Can Know delivers one of McEwan’s finest comic set pieces… [and] can be read as an optimist’s manifesto, a rage against our consensus of decline… [and] a cautionary tale of unchecked nostalgia

Times Literary Supplement

What We Can Know is an astonishing consideration of how the tendrils of the past leak into the present… It’s terrifyingly believable… McEwan cleverly structures the book to reveal his inner workings, while the thoughts he raises around loss…rumble spectacularly throughout

UK Press Syndication

An elegy from our future, haunting, playful and ultimately hopeful, What We Can Know is a wonderful book that interrogates the limits of knowledge and interpretation, and bold depiction of our decadent, dying era

Kaliane Bradley

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart

Elif Shafak

An extraordinary ode to our flawed current and future selves, capturing the fragility of the humanity that binds us

Chioma Okereke

Throughout, searching questions – not least about what we cannot, and refuse, to know – are couched in beautifully calibrated prose

Daily Mail

A carefully plotted literary novel with insightful characterization and the propulsive drive of a thriller…[it’s] McEwan’s most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years

Financial Times

It is very rare for a novelist to write his best work when he has been writing novels for half a century, but McEwan has done just that… [What We Can Know] may be judged his masterpiece. Remarkable. This novel has a rare and delightful vitality

Scotsman

Ian McEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents… What We Can Know is not lesser, and the pleasures…are in abundant supply

Spectator

Ian McEwan combines a post-apocalyptic dystopia, a love story and a thrilling mystery to great effect: this is an inventive, exquisitely written book

Economist, *Autumn Picks of 2025*

An extraordinary piece of work that defies neat categorization… I found What We Can Know‘s depiction of our drowned future rather twinkling and magical… [and] the detailed and serious portrait of Vivien and the men in her life to be gripping. The novel stayed with me for several days after I finished it… I thoroughly recommend it

New Scientist

[A] direct and pacy narrative, one that reveals dark secrets… a must-read

London Standard

What We Can Know is both an elegiac philosophical inquiry and a thumping literary mystery

Independent

A page-turner… very brainy, and very entertaining

Oldie, *Novel of the Month*

McEwan is masterly, measured and generous as he explores marriage, art, history and his speciality, how relationships can sour and alter after something irreversible occurs… A quiet tour de force

Shortlist, *Autumn Picks of 2025*