Will I love What We Can Know?

McEwan is one of my favorite writers, and as I was reading this, I was trying to figure out why I love his work so much.

There's just something so immersive about it: the way he uses language, the vividness of his characters, the descriptive and emotional accuracy and density of his moment-by-moment storytelling.

What We Can Know is a love story interwoven with a tense, high-stakes "thrillerish" plot powered by a heart-pounding narrative drive and sense of cold inevitability similar to those found in the author's other great novels, like Amsterdam and Atonement.

What sets this book apart… show more.

Ian McEwan tells an eminently readable story about a lost poem. But his book is about much more than this. Through its exploration of the relationship between past, present and future comes a warning of the need to value what we have now and to plan for a viable future. His depiction of the world of 2119 - less than a century away - is a fascinating but chilling one of the consequences of not heeding the incontrovertible signs of climate change and the world that has been lost. This story of the future reveals the lack of foresight of… show more.

Ian McEwan takes us into our presumptions, our blithe and superficial readings of other people's lives, and then upends them, along with any smugness that may remain. It is also a shot across the bow of academia, which always makes me smile.