NEED TO KNOW

Ian McEwan has a new book What We Can Know on the way

The Atonement author spoke with PEOPLE about how it came to be, where the title comes from and why the central question of the novel is also that of his own life

What We Can Know comes out Sept. 23

Ian McEwan doesn't know if his new novel, What We Can Know , will find its audience the same way Atonement did. But "as long as it pays the rent," he tells PEOPLE, he doesn't particularly care. "That's why I'm not a publisher. I just do what I want to do."

"As I was writing [ Atonement ], thinking this is a novel about the literary imagination, and no one's going to be very much interested, except maybe other writers, I remember having this conversation with my then-editor Dan Franklin, and I said that very thi

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