Children of Radium

Author Joe Dunthorne
Narrator Joe Dunthorne
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 3 April 2025
Run Time 5 hours and 37 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography: historical, political and military, Memoirs, Refugees and political asylum, Second World War, Violence, intolerance and persecution in history.

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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The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it.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

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

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

Surprising, daring, affecting... Dunthorne has found a tone that is at once predictably appalled and unpredictably amusing, wry, and self-mocking. His animated narrative voice is often funny without ever seeming facile or irreverent, and without trivializing -- or losing sight of -- the gravity of his subject... Beneath the book's lively surface are a number of complex and serious themes: courage, self-delusion, conscience, the unreliability of memory, and the folly of believing romantic family stories about the past

New York Review of Books

Wry, elliptical, hair-raising... A gripping story of family secrets and chemical warfare, it is also a tale of one writer's search for a reliable past. Deep in these pages you discover a travelogue of lucid suspicions, brilliantly pursued, where historical truths are finally brought into the light. The first-rate poet and novelist is ever-present, bringing images and psychic dimensions to the book that are simply unforgettable. Joe Dunthorne has written a contemporary classic

Andrew Ou2019Hagan

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