English novelist Ian McEwan has published What We Can Know, his 18th novel, set in the year 2119 in a Britain partly under water where climate change defined the “Derangement”.
McEwan describes the book as “science fiction without the science”.
The protagonist, Tom Metcalfe, works at a fictional university and investigates a lost poem heard at a 2014 party.
The novel explores how historical failures (in McEwan’s terms) shaped future societies.
Critics are calling the book a “philosophically charged tour de force” and say it may be one of McEwan’s strongest recent works.
