A new novel by Ian McEwan is coming later this year.
Knopf will publish the author’s What We Can Know in the fall, the press announced in a news release, describing the book as “a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.”
McEwan’s literary debut came in 1975 with the short story collection First Love, Last Rites, and he made his first appearance on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1981 for The Comfort of Strangers. He was also named a Booker finalist for Black Dogs, Atonement, and On Chesil Beach and won the prize in 1988 for Amsterdam. His most recent book, the novel Lessons, was published in 2022.
What We Can Know will follow a scholar in 2119, living in a world decimated by rising seas, who becomes obsessed with a lost poem written in 2014. He finds a clue that might lead him to discover the poem but soon realizes that the work’s backstory is not as idyllic as he had thought.
McEwan said in a statement, “This is a novel about history, and what we can know of it, and of each other. We live our lives between the dead and the yet to be born. Of the dead we know a little, but not as much as we think. About the present, we disagree fiercely. People of the future, of course, are beyond our reckoning, but we’re troubled by what we’ll bequeath them. As they look back at us, what will our descendants think, when they contemplate the diminished world we left them? They might envy us.”
What We Can Know is slated for publication on Sept. 16.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
