The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never published, and possibly the last great work of the old civilization. He’s reconstructing that evening from emails, phone data, and diaries, obsessed with the poet and more so with the poet’s wife. Then he finds the poem. The first half is the future looking back; the second half is 2014 itself, and it doesn’t match what he built. McEwan’s subject is what the record leaves out. This book got a lot of attention—it’s deserved.
What We Can Know