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Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne
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Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance
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Length TBA
Language English
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Off-beat, irreverent and subversive โ€“ 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The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life โ€“ an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it.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 knewโ€ฆ

Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London โ€“ a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one โ€˜jolly grandpaโ€™ 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 โ€“ 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 writerโ€™s search for a reliable past... Joe Dunthorne has written a contemporary classic' Andrew O'Hagan

ยฉ Joe Dunthorne 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

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Reviews

Wry, elliptical, hair-raising... A gripping story of family secrets and chemical warfare, it is also a tale of one writerโ€™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 Moving, funny, disturbing and deeply surprising, an action-packed meditation and a moral adventure story, full of the kinds of intimate and historical contradictions we all live with in one way or another. Like Primo Leviโ€™s Gray Zone, the territory this book explores is defined by its ambiguity and complexity, and we are lucky to have a writer of Dunthorneโ€™s enormous gifts to lead us on the trail An investigative memoir like no other. Written with such clear-eyed intelligence, it's by turns wryly entertaining, morally complex and, ultimately, profoundly moving. A remarkable achievement from a writer who is consistently at the top of his game Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey The best book Iโ€™ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old manโ€™s depression, โ€œwashing dishes as if trying to drown themโ€. A masterpiece . . . It will be huge Expand reviews
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