A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going ‘Full of wisdom and heart. I loved it’ Elif Shafak ‘A gripping page-turner’ Observer ‘It gave me so much pleasure’ New York Times 2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message. 2119: With the UK’s lowlands submerged by rising seas, those who survive are haunted by all that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, a university scholar, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, he reveals a story of entangled love and a brutal crime that challenges everything he thought he knew about the past.