Hey there, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Chloe Valtman filling in for Andrew Limbong this week.

Ian McEwen has a new novel out. It's his 19th, and it has been reminding commentators of the works the

novelist wrote in his early years, like the Cement Garden and his short story collection,

First Love Last Writes, books that earned the now 77-year-old author, the nickname

Ian Macarber. What we can know tells a planet Earth in the 22nd century. It's a world decimated

by climate change, populist leaders and unchecked artificial intelligence, and yet somehow

it's still turning. As McEwen tells Scott Simon in this interview, life goes on.

Be warned, reading the novel might elicit pangs of weird nostalgia for the times we're currently living in.

Here's Scott.

This message comes from heavyweight. Maybe you've laid awake and imagined how it could have been, how it might be, but the moment

to act was never right. Well, the moment is here, and the podcast making it happen is heavyweight

with Jonathan Goldstein, available wherever you get podcasts.

Ian McEwen's new novel may make you wonder, what really lasts? It's set in Britain a century from now an

island state that has become an archipelago, partly submerged by rising seas. Tom Metcalf is an academic

who's devoted his working life to finding a poem, a corona for Vivian, that the great poet Francis

Blundie composed and read for his wife at a dinner in

2014. But the poem has never been found. What did it say? What did it say of them? How did it

disappear? What we can know was the 19th novel from Ian McEwen, the Booker Prize winning author

of Amsterdam and other acclaimed works, including Atonement.

You joins us now from London.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Well, great pleasure.

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