What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Today we introduce the latest novel from one of the UK’s best-known writers, Ian McEwan. He is the critically acclaimed author of 19 novels and 2 short-story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. Four of his novels have been adapted for the big screen.

What We Can Know was published earlier this year. The publisher’s description of the book reads:

2119, the Highlands of the UK. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early 21st c, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.  At the heart of his obsession is a legendary lost poem read aloud once in 2014, and never heard again. As the century progressed into climate catastrophe and war, the poem became a myth, a symbol of what could have been and all that has been lost.

When Tom uncovers a clue that may lead to the poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.  At once a quest, a literary thriller and a love-story about people and the words they leave behind, ‘What We Can Know’ is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

This month’s book recommendations from Reading Circle members.

• Richard Osman The Impossible Fortune (A Thursday Murder Club book) (2025): Cosy crime!
• Tarik Youssef Cyril Amar James Bond’s Socialist Rivals (2024):  A non-fiction analysis of three TV spy series from the DDR, Russia and Poland. About: … the phenomenon of the spy as popular-culture hero and .. the complex nature of Cold War interactions across ideological divisions, geopolitical blocs and national borders. (OUP)
• Alexei Navalny Patriot: A Memoir (2024): Details Navalny’s life and career – personal challenges, society, corruption, different political régimes, and his unwavering fight against corruption.
• Lásló Krasznahorkai The Melancholy of Resistance (1989):
  A comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn’t even turn up for the exam. (The New Yorker)
• Ian Crofton Traitors (2009): True tales of treason that changed the world

Music Played

• Gymnopedie No 1 by Erik Satie, played by Pascal Roge
• The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams played by Nicola Benedetti with the London Philarmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton

Do join us next month, when we will be intoducing Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024. Here’s an extract from the publisher’s description:
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. … Together they watch our silent blue planet: endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day … So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Reviews of Orbital:

• … ‚Orbital‘ is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet. Grove Atlantic
• ‚Orbital‘ offers vehement appreciation of the world in a range of tones and situations. The Guardian