Ian McEwan WHAT WE CAN KNOW with Richard Ovenden
Bestselling author Ian McEwan discusses his new novel, ‘What We Can Know’ with Bodley Librarian Richard Ovenden
What We Can Know
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.
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of eighteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; and Lessons. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Richard Ovenden
Richard Ovenden is the Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries. He also serves as Head of Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) at Oxford.
Event Information
Doors open: 17:30
Running time: 18:00-19:00
Specific seating not reserved and so the venue will seat audience from the floor upwards.
Latecomers will be admitted at an appropiate point to the Galleries. Access to the floor will not be permitted.
Ticket Information
General Admission + Book: £30.00
Sales close prior to talk taking place.
Tickets are not available on entry
