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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.
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