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Table of Contents
About The Book
*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick*
In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this “profound...comic...[and] unconventional” (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.
Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory’s director, helping the Nazis to “improve” their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried’s work. Seeking to understand one “jolly grandpa” with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it?
Children of Radium is a witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on individual and collective inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.
In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this “profound...comic...[and] unconventional” (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.
Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory’s director, helping the Nazis to “improve” their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried’s work. Seeking to understand one “jolly grandpa” with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it?
Children of Radium is a witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on individual and collective inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.
About The Author
Photograph by Tom Medwell
Joe Dunthorne is the author of The Adulterants, O Positive: Poems, Wild Abandon, and Submarine, which was translated into fifteen languages and made into an award-winning film. His work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. He was born in Wales and lives in London.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (April 1, 2025)
- Length: 240 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982180775
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Raves and Reviews
"Profound . . . comic . . . unconventional . . . In Dunthorne’s hands, these disparate moments of bearing witness—sometimes in the most literal way—add up to a remarkable, strange, and complicated story, full of the shame and humor a lesser memoir might have avoided." —New York Times
"[A] bracing memoir [that] confronts us with a family legacy as unsettling as the warning sign posted outside the fenced-off Orgacid poison factory: 'Risk of death—Do not enter.'" —Wall Street Journal
“A slippery marvel. . . . Dunthorne’s voice—affable, warm, wry—casts a spell . . . 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 (UK)
"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." —Andrew O'Hagan, Financial Times
"It seems like every family has a bit of ancestral folklore, and Joe Dunthorne’s is better than most. . . . [Dunthorne] is an excellent companion throughout, telling the story with a mix of comic timing, wry self-depreciation, and genuine appreciation for the strange and difficult lives people live." —Chicago Tribune
"[Dunthorne's] 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
"The Welsh-born novelist seeks to unearth, and untangle, one particularly gnarled root of his family tree . . . Dunthorne's attempt to understand this painful paradox interweaves memoir, archival research, travelogue and a fair bit of family therapy.” —NPR
“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
“Enigmatic, self-deprecating, enjoyable. . . . [Dunthorne] brings a novelist's eye for detail.” —Sunday Times Culture (UK)
“In this excellent family memoir, Dunthorne digs down through layers of memory and myth to uncover an unsettling story. . . . 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. A triumph of stylish prose, the book tackles dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour.” —Irish Times
"Truly moving. . . . This is a story of cumulative denialism [and] many unanswerable questions." —Literary Review (UK)
"A funny and moving family history that troubles even as it entertains." —Monocle (UK)
"Riveting . . . Dunthorne strikes a near-perfect balance of history and personal reflection, and his questions about Merzbacher’s moral dilemmas resonate. This is a must-read." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A brave and beautiful memoir, Joe Dunthorne’s incisive exploration of his family history unearths stunning discoveries and takes the reader on a remarkable adventure that spans countries and resonates across generations. I have read many memoirs of the war and have never encountered anything like this. Lyrical but unflinching, this is an extraordinary book." —Ariana Neumann, New York Times bestselling author of When Time Stopped
"[A] beautifully rendered personal history, written with mature perspective as well as tenderness, crossing generations and traversing countries to expose the truth beneath the trauma and the travail of his great-grandfather’s life . . . It is warm and at times even radiant. . . . Dunthorne’s gently self-deprecating approach and his deep and disciplined research combine to make a very satisfying memoir." —Jewish Book Council
"Surprisingly funny as well as illuminating . . . Dunthorne brings his literary skills to the medium, offering us a story with more twists and turns than a road on the Amalfi Coast. There is also a delicious set of constantly-evolving characters." —Haaretz
"The memoir displays Dunthorne’s gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher." —Los Angeles Times
"Dunthorne’s winding story embraces other family members whose histories were less freighted with guilt, but [his great-grandfather] Siegfried’s lies at its heart as a cautionary tale of accommodating evil. A thoughtful, troubling addition to the literature of the Holocaust." —Kirkus Reviews
"[A] mind-spinning family history. . . . Rueful, determined, and funny, Dunthorne presents a galvanizing and revelatory saga of prickly personalities, desperation, denial, and the overriding drive to survive." —Booklist
"Children of Radium is an exhilarating exploration of legacy. Unburying family secrets—especially secrets this big, this profound—is painstaking and heartbreaking work. In the hands of a lesser writer, a story like this would collapse, become just a mush of uncertainty. But Dunthorne is a masterful guide, surefooted and diligent and honest and funny. We are with him, enthralled, every step of the way." —Menachem Kaiser, author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
"Unusual and very readable . . . Dunthorne’s careful attention to detail will hold the reader’s attention as he tries to determine what is true, partially true or false about his family’s past." —BookPage
"An extraordinary and unexpected journey; one finely and gently crafted." —Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Children of Radium eBook 9781982180775
- Author Photo (jpg): Joe Dunthorne Photograph by Tom Medwell(0.1 MB)
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