Solar

Ian McEwan

Having won a Nobel Prize for physics early in his career Beard can only find “excitement and unpredictability” in his private life, as professionally he has been enervated by sinecures and a treadmill of corporate junkets.

Short, bald and possessed of “a concertina of chins“, he has managed to clock up five marriages by his early 50s. The latest one is floundering as Patrice, his beautiful young wife, responds to his inveterate philandering by carrying on her own affair with their oafish builder.