Do you remember what you were doing at this same time yesterday? Last week? Last month? Ten years ago?

Today, the answer often lies in the enormous amount of digital residue we leave behind: chat logs, photos, emails, location history. Our devices remember more than we ever could.

Consider, then, how much data a historian would have to sift through to reconstruct an event from our era: all the browsing data, all the chat logs, all the emails, and of course, all the photos and videos. It’s an unprecedented amount of information—a blessing and a curse.

What We Can Know presents us with this scenario. It’s 2119, and the world is different. The polar ice caps have melted in a massive global disaster known as the Inundation, and America has been reduced to a collection of warring city-states. The prevailing world superpower is the Nigerian Empire, and with a significant portion of the planet submerged, most of the population live on relatively smaller islands.

For the protagonist, Thomas, all this is not too important. Thomas is a humanities professor who spends most of his time in archives and libraries doing research about an event that happened more than a hundred years before his time.

In 2014, the poet Francis Blundy held a dinner party for his wife Vivien’s birthday. His gift was a poem known as a corona: 15 sonnets linked together by a very specific set of rules. In addition to performing a live reading of the corona, he also presented Vivien with what was believed to be the only copy of the corona itself.

The poem has become legendary: a lost literary work from an era that was known for its overabundance of information. Thomas wants to believe that the text exists somewhere, and he has made it his life’s work to track it down.

What We Can Know takes our contemporary multi-connected way of life and examines it through the lens of a person from the future. It’s fascinating how a dinner party is reconstructed from multiple accounts and multiple points of view. Thomas uses archived chat logs, emails, and journal entries to piece together a comprehensive account of the event. It’s presented as a different kind of challenge: what does one do with too much information?

As a science fiction story that speculates about looking back instead of looking forward, What We Can Know is surprisingly engrossing.

Ian McEwan’s future setting is one that is both optimistic and somber: a world divided into small islands, where humans have learned from the lessons of the past and are harnessing nature and technology in sustainable ways, but also a world where isolation has slowed cultural development almost to a standstill. It’s made all the more intriguing by the hyper-focused scope: it all serves as a backdrop to the cloistered existence of an academic—one who spends half of his time living in the era of excess and carelessness that was 2014.

There are a good amount of themes that are touched upon in What We Can Know: technology, ethics, and the tragedy of knowing about climate change without doing anything about it. We live in interesting times, whether politically, culturally, or technologically, and What We Can Know speculates that this leads to the creation of some of the greatest works of literature in history. The novel also examines relationships: intimacy, fidelity, and betrayal, both of the physical and of the intellectual sort.

As Thomas digs deeper, new truths are revealed. The events remain the same, but with a clearer understanding of the dynamics and motivations of the people involved, he sees a different story start to unfold: one that goes to darker places.

What we have here, then, is a novel that is many things. It’s science fiction. It’s literary fiction. It’s a treasure hunt! Most importantly, it’s a story about being human, revolving around a single work of lost literature, but reaching far beyond in thematic scope and substance.

For that alone, it’s a worthy read. The reminder that what we post and chat about today may have far-reaching implications for the people who will sift through all our data a hundred years from now—that’s just a bonus. For readers who enjoy elegant prose, intimacy, and speculative fiction, What We Can Know is absolutely worth the read.