Books: Angsty millennials, an island paradise and a stand-up sage

How I Won a Nobel Prize - Julius Taranto (Pan Macmillan)

Julius Taranto’s debut novel, a delicious satire about academic life, is set at the Rubin Institute on Plymouth Island (RIP). The university has been established by billionaire Buckminster Witherspoon Rubin, who is more interested in the professional excellence of his teaching staff than their dubious personal behaviour. “This new Institute said: Give me your cancellees and deplorables, your preeminent deviants, we’ll take them!”

Helen, a bright young Jewish physicist, discovers that her own mentor, Nobel Prize-winning Perry Smoot, has fallen prey to a scandal and joined their number. Helen and Smoot have been working on high-temperature superconductors which hold the promise of a sustainable global power grid. The two might just save the planet. 

With so much at stake, Helen feels she has no option but to join Smoot and all the other offenders at RIP, dragging her outraged and reluctant boyfriend, Hew, along with her. Hew demands a “moral offset” for their complicity, and Helen agrees to go vegan.

While Helen tries to stay apolitical - after all, it’s the work that counts - Hew becomes increasingly radicalised, and the tension causes a huge stress on their relationship. Can Helen solve the problem of superconductivity before it is no longer tenable to remain at RIP?

The novel is a very humorous read, with much play made of the throbbing centre of the institute, a beige tower described by Helen as “a shlong of a building”.  But while there is glee in these pages, the book also grapples with the bigger question of whether ends justify means, and what compromises can be made in the name of a greater good before the entire endeavour comes asunder.