Helen Plum Library

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize: A novel of two 'wonderful characters' who meet by accident in Edwardian England, and fall inconveniently in love (The Washington Post). In 1912, rational scientist Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger-fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, and almost pathologically generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications-not...

A tale set in a world in which technological advances have been suppressed finds particle physicist Jon Grady helping to innovate a device capable of reflecting gravity only to be targeted by a shadowy organization from the future

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael's personal life is another matter entirely. His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities....

"World War Z meets The Martian in the explosive follow-up to Sleeping Giants ("One of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory"--NPR) and Waking Gods ("Pure, unadulterated literary escapism"--Kirkus Reviews). In her childhood, Rose Franklin accidentally discovered a giant metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. As an adult, Dr. Rose Franklin led the team that uncovered the rest of the body parts which together...

"The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she's an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people-pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs. Honestly, it's a pretty...

"Jay na Thalang is a demanding, driven genius. He doesn't know how to stop or even slow down. The instant he lays eyes on Maria Lopez, he knows that she is a sexy distraction he can't afford. He's done his best to keep her at arm's length, and he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Maria has always been cautious. Now that her once-tiny, apocalypse-centered blog is hitting the mainstream, she's even more careful about preserving her online anonymity....

"Quantum physicist Matt Bronik is suffering from strange, violent seizures that medical science seems powerless to explain - much to the consternation of his wife, Brigid. Matt doesn't think these fits could be related to his research, which he has always described as benign and esoteric. That, it turns out, is not quite true: Matt has been prodding the mysteries of the quantum universe, with terrible repercussions for his health. And perhaps even...

"When a once promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous particle physicist's memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: plagued by debt after failing to deliver a novel, he's grown distant from his wife--a successful A.I. researcher--and is haunted by an overwhelming dread he describes as "The Mist." Desperate for relief, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and emerges to find his world transformed: joy suffuses every...

"When her husband's car is found abandoned and on fire-in the middle of a rainstorm-police suspect that Eve Roth had something to do with it. After all, her husband was suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct with a student, and who else but an atmospheric physicist could incinerate a car in a downpour? But Eve has no idea why her husband disappeared. She's desperate to find him, both for herself and her beloved, disabled father-in-law....

"Berlin. 1963. The height of the Cold War. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, or at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and a lower level CIA operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist...