Imagine that by the mid-21st century, the impact of climate change is irreversible.

And decades of flooding, famine, pandemics, and war have upended life on Earth.

But rather than dwell on the catastrophe itself, the novel, What We Can Know, brings to life characters on either side of it.

Their loves, their betrayals, even crimes, with the future looking back at us.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown met up with Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan

for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

I'm trying to get, in the reader's mind, the past and the future and the present into some kind of mix, kind of timeless sense that you could get your mind around all three together.

To do that, British novelist Ian McEwen has imagined a future Britain.

Now a chain of islands after mass flooding, its population halved. But life, though

diminished, goes on. And a literature professor is obsessed with a mystery. What happened to a famous

poem written and then lost in our time?

I've read quite a lot of science fiction over the years, and I want to write a science

fiction with no science. science fiction over the years, and I've wanted to write a science with no science.

Science fiction without the science.

Meaning what?

Meaning what's the history, what's the future of history or the humanities or the future

of love, for example, or the daily life that I, you know, I don't want people getting

in and out of spaceships.

This is the 19th novel by McEwen, one of his generation's most acclaimed writers.

Amsterdam won the 1998 Booker Prize.

Atonement, perhaps is best known, as well as Chesel Beach and the Children Act, have been made into films.

Let me help with that.

...