Ian McEwan
What We Can Know
In 2014 a great poem is read aloud but never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy can be found.
In 2119, after the lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas, Tom Metcalfe – an academic at the University of the South Downs – comes across a clue that may lead to that lost great poem of 2014. His find reveals a story of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew.
Described by its author as ‘science fiction without the science’, Ian McEwan’s masterly new novel “What We Can Know” spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are, and where we are going.
We welcome Ian – Stroud Book Festival’s honorary patron – to tell us about this novel, which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
Sponsored by Richmond Villages, Painswick
