What We Can Know

In 2119 much of the western world lies under risen seas, and in the waterlogged south of what was England a lonely scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, longs for the early twenty-first century. His contemporaries call that era the Derangement, since people then understood climate change and did nothing. Metcalfe is obsessed with a lost poem by the celebrated poet Francis Blundy, a sequence of sonnets written for his wife Vivien's birthday and read aloud only once, at a dinner party in 2014, before it vanished. Together with Rose Church, his partner in life and research, he pores over the archives of that era for a clue. Ian McEwan has described it as science fiction without the science.

Barack Obama included it among his favorite books of 2025.