An Evening with Ian McEwan for What We Can Know
Tuesday 16th September
Bath Pavilion, N Parade Rd, Bathwick, Bath BA2 4EU
6.30pm
7pm
Ian McEwan, Booker Prize-winning author and friend of the bookshop, will return to Bath to celebrate his latest novel - What We Can Know – in September ahead of his global publication.
Ian McEwan is recognised by many to be one of the finest writers alive today, described by The Sunday Times as “the supreme novelist of his generation”. In a career which spans fifty years, he has published eighteen novels and two short-story collections, including the international bestselling, highly acclaimed Amsterdam, Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act, On Chesil Beach, Saturday and Lessons. Several of these novels have been adapted to the big screen.
How We can Know (published on 18 Sept) is a hugely compelling, deeply humane narrative that asks profound questions about who we are now and where we are going. Celebrating our current freedoms and the tenacity of the human spirit, McEwan’s new novel reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, whilst imagining a future world where all is not quite lost. Join us to hear this ideas-packed storyteller reflecting on this work and writing career.
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.