How I Won a Nobel Prize (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

An incisive, wickedly funny debut novel about a young graduate student who must follow her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to academics of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her marriage and conscience.

Helen is one of the best minds of her generation. A graduate student on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity and thereby save the planet, Helen finds herself torn when her advisor's sex scandal is exposed. Should she give up on her work and her brilliant advisor? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university off the Connecticut coast, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts the academics that other schools have thrown out? At the Institute, the disgraced and deplorable operate at the top of their fields with impunity and, indeed, every comfort.

Helen reluctantly decides she must go and brings along her partner, Hew, over his strenuous objections. As she settles into life at the Institute, Helen develops a crush on an older novelist, while Hew immerses in an increasingly radical protest movement. The rift between them deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives - and perhaps the world.

Funny, sharp, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, THE MORAL OFFSET illuminates our contemporary moral confusion, examining the prices we'll pay for progress, the ways we hedge our ethics, and, ultimately, how to both be good and do good. Turns out it's simple - if you can run the numbers.