How I Won A Nobel Prize

An incisive, refreshingly irreverent novel about a young physicist who finds herself exiled to an island research institute that gives safe harbour to ‘cancelled’ artists and academics, throwing her into crises of work, marriage and conscience. Helen, a graduate student on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity and thereby save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. When her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute off the Connecticut coast, which grants safe harbour to professors that other institutions and society have sent packing. Founded by a nefarious billionaire, RIP is a libertarian, libertine dream, a place where the disgraced and deplorable operate at the top of their fields with impunity and, indeed, every comfort. Unwilling to abandon her work, Helen decides to join her advisor at RIP, bringing along her partner, Hew, who is deeply uncomfortable about being there. As she settles into life at the institute, Helen develops a crush on an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew gets involved in an increasingly violent protest movement, the rift between them deepening until both face major – and potentially world-altering – choices. Impudent, wise, anchored in character and provocative without being polemical, Julius Taranto's How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches our contemporary moral confusion in a genuine and fresh way, examining the price we’re willing to pay for progress, the ways we all hedge our ethics and what it means, in the end, to be a good person. With How I Won A Nobel Prize Julius Taranto achieves the near-impossible: a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive, less about culture wars than the neverending battle of being human. A novel of ideas in the tradition of Norman Rush's Mating, How I Won A Nobel Prize is one of the best new novels I've read in years. Tara Isabella Burton