The Booker Prize-winning author of Amsterdam and Atonement here gives us a darkly hilarious view of planetary and personal peril. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him, as well as a womanizer who has cheated on each of his five wives, and a compulsive overeater. He speaks for enormous fees and halfheartedly heads a government initiative on global warming. Then his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, and an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and maybe save the world from environmental disaster.