Book Discussion: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Recommended for adults. Synopsis: 2014: Poet Francis Blundy honors his wife's birthday at a dinner by reading aloud a new poem 'A Corona for Vivien'. Little does anyone there know that in the future, people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found. 2119: In the future, a nuclear accident submerges much of the western world. In England, Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of a poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian'. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the poem's discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime - destroying his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.