What we can know

2014: During Vivien Blandy's birthday party, her husband Francis recites the poem "A Crown for Vivien," enchanting the guests. This is the first and last time the work is ever read aloud, and the occasion is regarded as a landmark literary event. One hundred years later, poetry lovers, researchers, and scholars speculate about the poem's meaning, yet no copy of it has ever been found.
2119: The low-lying regions of the United Kingdom have been submerged due to rising sea levels, turning the country into an archipelago of scattered islands. The survivors carry with them the memory of the richness and diversity of this drowned civilization.
Tom Metcalf, a researcher at the University of South Downs, based on one of the islands of the British archipelago, studies archives from the early decades of the twenty-first century, fascinated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life before the catastrophe. However, the chance discovery of a clue that he hopes will lead him to the great lost poem brings to light tangled love affairs and a crime, overturning his certainties about a story he believed he understood deeply.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece: a feat of imagination, a love story that speaks as much about people as about the words they leave behind, a literary thriller that captures our present stripped of the sense of impending doom and imagines a future world in which not everything has yet been lost.
"A bold, beautiful novel, with soul and wisdom." - Elif Shafak
"What We Can Know may well have invented a new literary genre: the post-apocalyptic campus novel. Imagine Possession by A. S. Byatt crossing paths with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. In What We Can Know, dark academia converses with the novel of ideas in the masterful manner of Ian McEwan." - Sunday Times
"A narrative tour de force from one of the leading voices in contemporary Anglophone literature." - Kirkus