What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
In 2014, a famous English poet celebrated his wife’s birthday with a dinner, which later became a famous literary event. In 2119, a literary historian in the post-apocalyptic British Archipelago, sets out to recover every discoverable detail of that party, and to locate the birthday present: a lost cycle of 15 sonnets thought to have been a masterpiece. I personally found this fascinating exploration of the meaning and mechanism of History nearly impossible to read because one plot thread involves a vivid rendition of a character’s decline into dementia. I learned too much about that from my mother’s last 18 years and I avoid Alzheimer books. Oh well.