Ian McEwan's latest novel, 'What We Can Know,' published on September 18, 2025, by Jonathan Cape, explores a bleak future shaped by climate change and nuclear conflict, set in 2119 Britain now transformed into a waterlogged archipelago.

Set in a post-apocalyptic Britain where Oxford is on a mountain in Snowdonia, the novel delves into environmental devastation and societal upheaval, emphasizing that it is not a traditional sci-fi story but a reflection on humanity's resilience.

The story portrays a dystopian world marked by environmental and political crises, including population decline and societal collapse, while also addressing the crisis facing the humanities in education.

Amidst these upheavals, Britain has become an archipelago, Nigeria has risen as a dominant power, and America is fragmented into warlord-controlled regions, illustrating a fractured global landscape.

McEwan describes the novel as a blend of catastrophe, pessimism, and faint hope, reflecting his worldview and concerns about declining faith in the future and progress.

The narrative shifts between a detailed post-apocalyptic setting and a personal mystery involving Tom, a scholar studying 17th-century poetry, who seeks a lost nature poem by Francis Blundy, revealing themes of nostalgia and the contrast between facts and knowledge.

This literary mystery explores themes of information overload, the search for truth, and the tension between historical understanding and focus on the present, echoing McEwan's earlier work 'Atonement'.

Despite his pessimism, McEwan finds hope in environmental recovery efforts and human resilience, citing rewilding and species rescue as examples of long-term efforts to undo damage.

McEwan emphasizes that it is not too late for humanity to act, advocating for understanding and patience, and believing that long-term evolution can help preserve human attention spans and capabilities.

He criticizes the threat of AI to the novel, asserting that genuine human storytelling, with its emotional depth and originality, remains irreplaceable by AI 'writers'.

Reflecting on the state of literature, McEwan notes the decline of traditional male-dominated literary culture and the rise of TV and media, expressing skepticism about AI replacing human creativity in writing.

Overall, the novel is densely packed with themes ranging from personal histories and global crises to philosophical questions, which some critics find overstuffed and less successful due to its complexity.