Accompany Ian McEwan and George Monbiot for an exploration of humanity’s remarkable resilience and an expedition through a climate-torn tomorrow where hope endures against the odds.

From his meteoric ascent to literary prominence for his incisive, uncompromising tales of passion and longing, to his recent explorations of climate catastrophe and artificial intelligence, Ian McEwan’s remarkable body of work maintains one constant thread: his surgical ability to examine both the complexities of human nature and the challenges defining our era.

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people have speculated 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 a lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

George Monbiot meets Ian McEwan to unveil What We Can Know: a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our looming sense of catastrophe and asks profound questions about who we are and where we are going.

All tickets to this event include a copy of Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know (RRP £22).

There will be a post-event book signing in the main foyer.