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Children of Radium

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Off-beat, irreverent and subversive – a Jewish family memoir about convenient delusions and unsayable truths, from the acclaimed author of the cult classic novel, Submarine

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home.
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew…

Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it?
Children of Radium is a remarkable, searching meditation on individual and collective inheritance. Witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising, it considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

'A gripping story of family secrets and chemical warfare [and] a tale of one writer’s search for a reliable past... Joe Dunthorne has written a contemporary classic' Andrew O'Hagan

© Joe Dunthorne 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man’s depression, “washing dishes as if trying to drown them”. A masterpiece . . . It will be huge
Financial Times
A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story . . . The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness
Observer
Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful . . . [Joe Dunthorne] infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book’s final quarter more profound. Remarkable
The New York Times
Disturbing, wry, riveting, Children of Radium tells European history like never before
Irish Times, 'Recommended Summer Reading 2025'
A nimble, questioning, entertaining book that nevertheless costs its subjects nothing in dignity . . . Dunthorne follows his material further than he might have done, taking the journey in many unexpected directions, and the book benefits from it. His account is also funnier than it has any right to be, since he is a wry guide . . . He maintains a personal touch while broadening out to tell a riveting, tentacular story
Times Literary Supplement
Children of Radium is more than a memoir. It’s a detective thriller set in Berlin, Ankara and New York, as Dunthorne tries to track down the truth about his great-grandfather after nearly a century of distortions. It’s a book about what happens when a “comforting fantasy”, passed down through generations, is shattered by reality. It’s a lesson in history, chemistry and genocide studies, from radioactive toothpaste to chemical warfare. It is also, I should stress given the grimness of the subject matter, a funny, heart-warming and engaging page-turner… You don’t need a personal stake in this period of history to be moved, horrified and entertained by Dunthorne’s story, which is full of bizarre juxtapositions too strange to be fiction
New Statesman
Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story, Children of Radium is a family memoir that records Joe Dunthorne’s discovery of just how little he knew of his German Jewish heritage, and his grandmother’s childhood escape from the Nazis . . . As revelations and ambiguities mount, the book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice, oscillating between potential indictment and mitigation
Observer, 'Books of the Year 2025'
Enigmatic, self-deprecating, enjoyable . . . [Dunthorne] brings a novelist's eye for detail to Children of Radium
Sunday Times
Spry, self-aware, irresistible . . . Dunthorne carefully fillets his vast material for the most vivid details . . . This is a valuable account which seeks neither to praise [its protagonist] nor to bury him
Financial Times
[An] excellent family memoir [and] a triumph of stylish prose . . . Dunthorne digs down through layers of memory and myth to uncover an unsettling story, tackling dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour . . . Children of Radium is a powerful exploration of the struggle to separate truth from the stories we want to believe. Dunthorne interrogates not just the omissions and self-deceptions in his great-grandfather's memoir, but also his own complicated motivations for revisiting his familial past
Irish Times
Author Joe Dunthorne
Narrator Joe Dunthorne
Duration 5 hours and 37 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781405977890
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Biography: historical, political and military, Memoirs, Refugees and political asylum, Second World War, Violence, intolerance and persecution in history
Availability AU, GB, IE

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