Solar

Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist coasting on work he did decades ago — lazy, gluttonous, on his fifth marriage, serially unfaithful. By a sequence of accidents involving a dead colleague and a stolen idea, he becomes the unlikely figurehead of a solar energy project that could actually solve climate change. McEwan uses Beard's spectacular moral failure to make the sharpest possible argument about the gap between knowing and doing — here is a man who understands the science completely and cannot apply any of it to his own life. The funniest climate novel ever written and the most honest about the species-level irony of our situation: we have the intelligence to understand our catastrophe and apparently not the character to stop it.