The Right Amount of Brilliance

The Right Amount of Brilliance is a work of literary fiction that tells the story of Jake Washington and Sebastian Barnabas, two middle-aged professors working in the California Bay Area. After a chance event, they find out they are twins who were separated at the age of three. This revelation exposes their families’ histories and the issues that led to their estrangement. While Jake and Sebastian reckon with the past, they must also contend with personal conflicts at work. Jake, a scientist at Berkeley, is analyzing a newly found Martian meteorite, but he must protect his research from an underhanded colleague. Sebastian, a mathematician at Stanford, is embroiled in a lawsuit-a product of his rampant womanizing. Eventually, the conflicts between Jake, Sebastian, their families, and everyone who knows them grow increasingly complex, culminating in devastating consequences. The architecture of the book is modeled on Pascal’s triangle.