What We Can Know – Ian McEwan

This is one of McEwan’s best books, one that should be read slowly to savour his exceptional writing. In 2014, an acclaimed poet reads a new poem dedicated to his wife on her birthday, at a dinner party in England. But the poem is never published and so is lost. Over the next 100 years, the world undergoes a collapse of civilization with cataclysmic climate change exacerbated by nuclear wars. So in 2119, an academic in a Humanities Department discovers an astonishing clue in surviving archives. Thus a literary thriller about life and love provides profound insight into human nature.