Ian McEwan novel What We Can Know to be published this year

‘We have the knack of surviving somehow’ … Ian McEwan. Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian

A new novel by Ian McEwan, which is set nearly a century in the future in a UK partly submerged by rising seas, will come out later this year.

What We Can Know is “science fiction without the science”, said McEwan. “My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time.”