This is a really enjoyable satire that skewers both the conservative right and the 'woke' left. Playful, inventive and smart, it might have too neat an ending but there is a lot to enjoy along the way

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto is a thought-provoking and irreverent satirical novel unpacking cancel culture and politics.

"How I Won a Nobel Prize" is a smart, satirical novel about a physics PhD student -- Helen -- who follows her disgraced mentor to an academic haven for "cancelled" scientists known as the Rubin Institute Plymouth, or RIP for short (and the symbolism doesn't end there). The protagonist, Helen, is working on potentially world-changing research on high-temperature superconductivity, so even though she is not a fan of the decidedly un-PC politics of the Institute, she reluctantly joins her mentor there. Her socialist spouse, Hew, even more reluctantly goes with her -- but only if they both agree to become vegan.

The story itself is interesting, and the novel's satire takes swipes at everything from "cancel culture" to academia to socialist-anarchists to billionaires. Having listened to this audiobook (very well-narrated by Lauren Fortgang) in 2023, I couldn't help but think of its timeliness, and the fact that it is not unrealistic to think that an institution like RIP could materialize in real life in the not-too-distant future. As the story progressed, I found myself invested in finding out what happened next. The ending did not disappoint.

Regrettably, I struggled to fully engage with this book, possibly due to my limited understanding of physics and disconnect from academic settings. Nonetheless, at its heart, the narrative explores themes of resisting corruption and greed, highlighting how easily we can lose sight of our values when consumed by ambition. Despite my difficulties, the book presents compelling themes and intriguing characters that are likely to resonate with other readers.

I kept asking myself as I read this definitely worth-reading, recommended novel, how would the title be delivered... it was, and in most entertaining ways.
This is a novel of ideas, an academic comedy of manners, and satire in the times of MeToo, cancel culture, STEM, Climate Crisis, and etc etc. The narrator is a wonderfully believable physicist (who happens to be a woman) that finds herself, in the pursuit of fulfilling her career dream, following her Nobel-prize mentor to a new academic institution, an island of non-wokeness, presided by a main building (a phallic-shaped skyscraper, the Endowment) which has been recruiting top cancelled scholars of all disciplines and provided them with unlimited funds to further their researches...
Helen is married to Hew, also intellectually able, socially committed, and the second fiddle in this slightly Asperger's spectrum couple. So, we have a career physicist who is not trapped by any feminine stereotypes and who believes in meritocracy and the power of her intellect, relishing the challenges of superconductivity and working with a top scholar, having to deal with a partner who is increasingly challenging her reluctance to engage actively with the great ethical wars of the times...
The good thing about this novel is that it presents all sides of the multiple equations presented with equal caricatural reality, and that arguments are worked out in comedic scenes that impel you to do some light ethical thinking of your own, which is positively positive. The writing takes you along and Helen's voice convinced me. I don't know if the scientific side of things is actually accurate, but it sounded believable.
An action-packed fitting finale helped the fairy tale elements of the story to a satisfying conclusion.

This debut novel by Julius Taranto is satire du jour - it’s an irreverent, clever piece of satire that explores MeToo, cancel culture, the old boys’ club and “wokeism”.

It’s a deft piece of work in the sense that the author inhabits different perspectives effortlessly and with humour, and it manages to entertain and challenge your brain. It left me reflecting on modern discourse in a way that no other novel has done for a long time.

Helen is a physics doctoral student working on high temperature superconductivity and about to make an important scientific breakthrough when the professor she works (Percy Smoot) with sleeps with a student and finds himself cancelled. Smoot is exiled to the Rubin Institute on Plymouth Island (RIP) off the coast of Connecticut, an elite institution founded specifically for the purpose of housing the elite who have been cancelled. RIP is a haven from cancel culture, considering itself a place to escape from diversity quotas and political correctness. The only problem is that Helen and her husband Hew are left-leaning liberals whose ideal of hell is a libertarian university dubbed as “Rape Island”.

Helen begins to put her concerns about RIP aside to focus on her scientific work but Hew becomes increasingly embroiled in a left wing anarchist movement that wants to take down RIP and its founder. You’ll have to read the book to see how it all plays out but it’s a clever and engrossing read.

I feel like this will be a Marmite book - it’s heavy on theoretical physics at times and I didn’t always like how Taranto wrote his female protagonist, but it’s original, straight faced and yet farcical, and oh so topical. 4/5⭐️

*Many thanks to Picador for the arc via @netgalley. As always, this is an honest review.

This is a very funny book about cancel culture and the age we live in. But it isn’t flip. Rather, it is genuinely open minded and thought provoking in a way the victims of Taranto’s skewering would never be.

Clever, witty and enjoyable. Unlike any book out there at the moment, this one will keep you running through the pages of this funny, irreverent and interesting novel
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Thank you to the publisher for the arc!

Unfortunately, I didn't click with this book. I think a lot of the themes may have been too intellectual for me and I struggled with the science-heavy content.
I did enjoy the elements of the story that related to the relationship between Hew and Helen, and to the RIP Institute and its reason for being - I would have liked that in particular to have been given more pages.
Hew and Helen were equally incapable of having a healthy relationship and I think their versions of unhealthy got misaligned and then came back together towards the end, which was an interesting was to view the duration of a partnership. I would have liked to have some breadcrumbs as to what had caused the shift in Hew before the revelation, which comes at the end of the book.
Whilst I take a lot of the responsibility for not being able to connect with the story, I think it could have been made more accessible with a paring back of physics, using that to increase the human impact on the events that unfolded...but that's probably not the story that Julius Taranto wanted to write.

A highly entertaining, irriverent and well written satire of the academic world where no-one is acting according to what you expect but everything is quite realistic.
Thought provoking and witty
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Julius Taranto's debut is a delightfully smart, entertaining, witty, humorous, philosophical and thought provoking satire on contemporary issues that will resonate for readers with their application to the world of academia. Helen is a seriously talented physics graduate operating in the field of high temperature superconductors which just might have the potential to help address the climate crisis but finds herself in a quandry. Her supervisor, Perry Smoot, finds himself entangled in a sexual misconduct scandal, and heads to a billionaire funded Rubin Institute Plymouth, on a small island off the New England coast, which welcomes, celebrates and gives home to the disgraced and the other unwanted and unacceptable public figures, providing they have the ability.

There is no cancel culture on RIP, there is no elements of a intrusive HR department, how anyone behaves is irrelevent in the anything goes environment. Helen makes the decision to follow Smoot, her work is just far too important, becoming a vegan, her partner, Hew accompanying her too. The well resourced facilities are an attractive feature for the liberal Helen whose single minded focus is her study, working with her supervisor, but there is an increasing shift in her perspective, a pragmatism begins to emanate from her, could the climate actually improve levels of creativity? Futhermore, there is an attraction and she catches the eye of the billionaire too. Hew finds much that is far too reprehensible, and is unable to accept the moral vacuum at the heart of the culture as he shifts towards the protest movement on and off the island, and online.

Some readers may be put off by the lack of punctuation and the extensive scientific details in the narrative, but I would like to say personally I found none of this off putting when it comes to appreciating the scope and themes of the novel. Taranto explores the culture wars, moral ambiguities, and cancel culture with care and sensitivity, highlighting failures in the right wing approaches and those on the left. There are hypocrisies, contradictions, human emotions, and so much more here. It is the intelligence, humanity, humour and the heart that made this such a brilliant read which I would like to highly recommend to a wide range of other readers. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

'How I Won a Nobel Prize' is a funny and morally complex satirical campus novel, exploring politics, power, so-called culture wars and the pursuit of knowledge and ideas. These are well-trod topics but Taranto finds a new angle and avoids over-simplification whilst also crafting a highly compelling read.

The narrator, Helen, is a promising physics graduate student working in the pioneering area of high-temperature superconductors which might just be the solution to the climate crisis. But when her Nobel Laureate supervisor Perry Smoot is accused of sexual misconduct, she and her (sort of) husband Hew find themselves following him to the Rubin Institute Plymouth (RIP) on a small island off the coast of New England.

RIP is home to 'cancelled' academics and public figures who have been exiled from the mainland, lured by the enticing prospect of 'no Code of Conduct, no Human Resources, only Your Work'. Initially, progressives are delighted by the idea of 'an academic prison colony where the worst-behaved of great minds would live out their days, closed off from the pleasures of civilized life' - but nobody had 'expected them to have such a good time', and the sight of disgraced billionaire founder B.W. Rubin's towering 'Endowment' looming over the mainland becomes a permanent provocation to the protesters who gather on New Haven pier and nickname RIP 'Cancel U' and 'Rape Island'.

While Hew is outraged at their forced relocation, Helen is initially more pragmatic, focused above all on her work which is made easier by RIP's superior facilities and funding. However, a number of complications are introduced, including Helen's friendship with novelist Leo Lens (modelled on Philip Roth) and the growing attentions of BW Rubin himself, all of which places further strain on Helen and Hew's relationship.

This is such a a clever novel which explores well-worn debates in an original way. Helen and Hew are both forced to consider the moral price they are prepared to pay for their ideas and whether any human achievements are great enough to outweigh moral failings. Taranto avoids picking sides but instead seems to encourage us to embrace uncertainty and complexity - and makes the physics much more interesting and compelling than I had ever thought possible!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

A send up of so-called cancel culture, this is an original and sprightly comic novel. With lots of scientific terminology and content, it is not a quick or easy read. It is, however, thought provoking and a lot of fun.

I have to admit that this was a bit of an odd one! The story is that of graduate student, Helen who discovers that her esteemed advisor is involved in a sex scandal.
The novel is set in an island research institute that provides a safe haven for "canceled" artists and scientists, it’s slightly bizarre but also thought-provoking. It’ll probably be a bit of a marmite read.

I enjoyed this (if I might say) rather odd novel. It's satirical, yes, but also there's an intelligence about it. It's refreshing in its difference. It tackles humour through philosophy and some wider cultural issues. I often had to re-read a couple of pages, but that, I took as a narrative tool used by the writer, rather than a mistake, and I got to enjoy it. Well worth a read, and my thanks to to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

The premise of How I Won a Nobel Prize is intriguing - an educational institute is set up for cancelled academics, and our narrator is on the brink of a world-changing discovery - but the execution was disappointing.

The characters fell flat for me, and the lack of punctuation for dialogue was frustrating. Combine that with a too-heavy focus on physics and I'm lost.

While there are some strong themes here, this just didn't hit the mark for me. How I Won a Nobel Prize wants to be a satirical commentary on cancel culture and academia, but felt more like a book constantly trying to prove it's smarter than you.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

This was a mad romp from beginning to end and probably one of the most thought-provoking reads I have experienced in a while.

A billionaire (with the suitably ridiculous name of Buckminster Witherspoon Rubin) founds an academic institution on a small island to house the 'unmentionables' that have been rejected from the traditional upper echelons of society and academia: bigoted judges, racist CEOs, the faculty sexual misconduct repeat-offenders and so on. The population runs the gamut of transgression from un-PC tweet to r*pe and neo-Nazism. As is often the case, the majority of the population are men in high positions of authority who are unable or unwilling to continue their lives with the rest of society.

I've been waiting for a book to come out that tackles the rise of 'cancel culture' and what it really means to 'cancel' somebody in the modern age. The humorously ludicrous premise of the novel takes this very subject-matter in its hands with gusto and manages to weave into its plot the provocative and difficult questions about privilege, morality, and the separation of art and artist, the thing done and the doer. Taranto explores what might entail if cancel culture really was capable of isolating people physically as opposed to just morally and ideologically, inflicting upon them the twenty-first century equivalent of exile. Taranto goes even further to ask: what if that doesn't achieve what we anticipate, instead creating a small haven of anti-wokeness where absolutely anyone can participate provided they have the intelligence to contribute?

I really appreciated this novel's grappling with various perspectives on the question of how to approach the fact that people can produce great, admirable works of art, make astounding discoveries that push the world forward, but can also do profoundly immoral and reprehensible acts. For starters, Taranto explores partly how many of these people actually do defend their own actions but also how their actions are defended by others. One of the funniest parts of the book is at the beginning when the protagonist and her partner decide that they must go vegan if they choose to participate in the Rubin Institute. This introduced a question that underlies the rest of the novel and preoccupies the minds of what some would dismiss as the 'woke crowd' - how do we weigh up the good and bad we do in the world so that as individuals we come out even? The push to veganism is seen as a conciliatory measure for the fact that the pair are participating in a system that purposefully and proudly makes space for people of privilege who have transgressed. Crude locker-room behaviour and more insidious cultures of misogyny that permit sexual misconduct and harassment find safety on the island, creating a society predominantly of men in power who have abused their positions with impunity - after all, the island does its best to prove itself a utopia despite being a place of exile.

I liked that this novel explored the various emotional responses to injustice - how do we feel and act when compelled to? What if we don't feel much compulsion to act at all? Is it ok if we buy chocolate from companies that employ slave labour if we volunteer at food banks on the weekend? Do buying fast fashion and refusing to fly on planes cancel each other out? If we participate in corrupt systems are we also responsible?

One of my favourite quotes was this very thought-provoking speech:

'Don't you see wokeness is a theology? But a theology with no text, no god, no organising myth or principles, no traditions. There is in this millenial religion only the vaguest sense of good and evil, applied to daily life by an ever-shifting clergy of popular priests and priestesses. On their phones at all hours, they "follow" the priest du jour, absorbing the gospel, then some find a new priest, schism, then schism again. They do not have a religion: it is the religion of the mob'.

I think Taranto is correctly identifying an urge to investigate 'cancel culture' a bit more deeply - that very nebulous and undefined term and its consequences for people in real life, online and otherwise. What this book and people in general are beginning to realise is that cancel culture although it isn't precisely a 'real' and troubling phenomenon that people suffer from most of the time, it is still a salient force particularly online.

I think we can recognise that some of the ideologies surrounding cancel culture are correct yet cancel culture itself is not precisely the right answer, it's flawed and often does not even achieve what its supporters would like it to. But what is the solution, then? I'm not sure, but this book definitely has me thinking about it. I really enjoyed this and loved that it raised some really prescient and serious questions while remaining funny, irreverent and entertaining.

A different, intelligent, ambitious, thought provoking, explicitly metaphor heavy if at times rather uneven and scattergun satirical debut novel dealing with campus cancel culture and with wider issues around changing social mores.

The first party narrator is Helen – a brilliant, extremely focused graduate student who specialises in the area of high temperature superconductivity (HTS(, particularly the fictional Nobel Prize winning Zhou-Eisenstadt-Smoot Theoretical Model. With Zhou in China (and largely out of collaborative reach now) and Eisenstadt dead (“in a dreadful accelerator accident, particles everywhere”) she had entered a four year collaboration with Percy Smoot at Cornell, her particular skill programming of the computer simulations as they aim for a practical generalisation of ZEST which could lead to a huge breakthrough in cheap and climate change friendly energy sources.

Now though, Perry has moved to Rubin Institute, “a liberterian, libertine dream: bottomless funding, unencumbered by institutional regulations … they eschewed trigger warnings … No code of conduct, No Human Resources … the promise it made to students … Learn from geniuses, graduate sans debt, feel free to carry Mace ….. Sandals for scandals” after a scandal with a student he groomed. After months of initial resistance Helen feels she has no academic choice but to join him, to the disgust of her socially active partner Hew (who nevertheless agrees to come with her, demanding at a minimum that they become vegan as a moral offset). Hew and Helen’s relationship is a complex one – a kind of marriage which they only affirm when it is challenged but play down when it is acknowledged (even between each other).

The Institute itself is a deliberately odd mix of fantastic working conditions and a deliberately amoral, non-politically correct social environment, one Hew finds completely intolerable, but which Helen largely tries to ignore as she concentrates single-mindedly on her collaboration with Perry.

An additional complication is Helen meeting (and finding herself attracted to – and in a kind of affair which is not an affair with) Leopold Lens a Roth-type non-orthodox Jewish author who her father adores. She also finds herself increasingly in the attention of the eponymous billionaire founder of the Institute one designed to provoke what he calls the “faculty lounge neopuritan Maoists” of Yale and other mainstream institutions.

Hew meanwhile far from coming to an accommodation with the Institute’s moral ambiguities is increasingly repulsed by them and takes part in various protests and protest groups onshore, at the Institute and particularly online.

Helen by contrast is largely apolitical – particularly when it comes to what she sees as largely performative position taking and scientifically focused. The book takes lengthy pseudo-scientific detours into her work.

And the breach between them grows larger after a number of incidents (a murderous right wing counter attack on a mainland protest, a doubling down of the Institute’s more right wing positions, a largely ignored sexual assault at the Institute,– note this latter storyline was I felt one of the less well and rather superficially handled) leads to a mutual misinterpretation of each other’s position before culminating literally explosively in an incident which finally brings them together.

And the book ends more focused on an idea of Hew’s that becomes somewhat viral – Dynamic Equity (using AI algorithms, behavioural analytics and blockchain to directly deal with inequity) - one that in another author’s hands would I think have been the whole book but which here is something of a late add-on, very much in keeping with this novel which if anything is overstocked with ideas but never less than stimulating and one easy to read cover to cover.

Recommended.