BLACKWELL’S BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025 • The Atlantic’s Top 10 • The Standard’s Best 2025 Titles to Buy for Book Lovers • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • New York Times • The Washington Post • The New Yorker • NPR • Barnes & Noble • Kirkus • Audible • The Guardian • ELLE • The Conversation • Vanity Fair • The Boston Globe • The Economist

“[What We Can Know] gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Mr. McEwan is a novelist of consummate skill, and his latest book a deeply intelligent addition to—perhaps even a crowning of—his oeuvre.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Ian McEwan belongs on the list of authors whose novels work well as an antidote to doomscrolling. Spend an hour with one of his books and you start to feel the world settling back into place as he quietly reaches for the right word, again and again. In a world of all-caps tweets, it does the mind good to experience language deployed with such care, and so invitingly. . . . What We Can Know is a timely and typically thoughtful addition to McEwan's impressive corpus.” —Toronto Star

“[What We Can Know is] brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted. . . . [McEwan] demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart.” —The Washington Post

“[A] bracing new time bender of a novel. . . . Elegantly structured and provocative . . . [What We Can Know] is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.” —Los Angeles Times

“What We Can Know immerses us—aptly enough—in an apocalyptic future in which much of the UK is under water, but this mise-en-scène just as nimbly pivots to a story of scholarly, literary and romantic obsession, all varieties of doggedness McEwan has previously probed. . . . Present too, is a sensitively performed air of melancholy and loss, both in Tom’s pursuit of a literary-critical grail and in the ecological catastrophe that surrounds him. With these elements combining to make this an ambitious and accomplished work of fiction, it’s a rewarding and thought-provoking [read].” —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

“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

“An inventive, exquisitely written book.” —The Economist

“A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart.” —Elif Shafak

“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, author of The Ministry of Time

“McEwan’s most richly layered work.” —The Sunday Times

“What We Can Know feels like a direct descendant of Atonement, McEwan’s most beloved work, where an illicit relationship generates unexpected tremors, and fantasy and memory rush into the gaps between facts.” —The New Yorker

“The movement between the domestic and the geopolitical . . . [is] carried off here with winning audacity. . . . McEwan hasn’t lost his touch for the grisly, and it all serves in its melodramatically heightened way to suggest that ‘what we can know’ is always pretty much nothing—and that this might be very much for the best.” —The Observer (UK)

“McEwan’s prose is characteristically elegant, coolly precise yet warmed by humour. He can turn a roasted quail into a symbol of vanished abundance, a gin and tonic into a study of ageing hands. . . . [Readers] are rewarded with something rare: a meditation on what literature itself can salvage from time’s wreckage. . . . [What We Can Know] leaves a lingering ache, a reminder that all archives, no matter how complete, are haunted by love’s irretrievable moments.” —Irish Independent

“It's a richly told tale of our deranged present—and where it may lead without course correction.” —Todd Woody, Bloomberg

“Gripping.” —The Irish Times

“What We Can Know is an arresting exploration of the unbridgeable gulf between past and present.” —The Herald (Scotland)

“What We Can Know combines the satisfactions of a literary mystery with a profound philosophical enquiry into the limits of human understanding in our data-saturated era.” —Claire Allfree, The Telegraph (UK)

“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, The Sunday Times

“McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane. . . . The sentences are warm even when the world they describe has cooled due to nuclear dust settling into the atmosphere as The Derangement faded. . . . McEwan, who turned 77 this year, writes with the lucidity of a craftsman who knows he’s constructing his own monument to a future he will never know. . . . If Atonement asked whether fiction could redeem guilt, What We Can Know suggests that the very possibility of redemption might be foolhardy.” —The New Republic

“McEwan fans, rejoice: the novel ranks high among his oeuvre . . . close to Atonement and Amsterdam.” —The Boston Globe

“What We Can Know is an extraordinary piece of work that defies neat categorization. . . . Sensationally well written. . . . Clever and thought provoking. . . . I was amazed by every twist.” —New Scientist

“[McEwan] still has the capacity to surprise. . . . [He] upends his own carefully constructed tale with an unexpected twist of the kind the author has built his name on.” —Marie Claire (UK)

“I won’t spoil the mystery, but I will say that [What We Can Know] is the only thing that made me cry in 2025. It is a masterpiece.” —Vulture

“[A] powerful homage to a lost era … McEwan has achieved something spectacular and much needed, as he raises question about the climate crisis—future and present. Readers will also find in it meditations on the value of the humanities, the work of poets and biographers, the difference between knowledge of and poetical apotheosizing of nature, and a beautiful recognition of what it means to search for human bonds in words and on pages…. McEwan has crafted a story at once nostalgic and foreboding.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“McEwan offers up a heady, intellectual tale that takes a searing look at how history is created—and distorted…. Dealing with themes as weighty as the inexorable forward progress of humankind, and the relevance of the past in a world where the present is both ‘loud and ruthless,’ McEwan proves once again he is both a master of his craft and a gimlet-eyed observer of the human condition.” —Booklist (starred review)