Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

De: Joe Dunthorne

Narrado por: Joe Dunthorne

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The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it.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

©2025 Joe Dunthorne (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey (Philippe Sands)

Devastating and brilliant. A complex but hugely readable story that ranges across the lingering half-life of twentieth century European history, all told with Joe Dunthorne’s trademark dry wit. It’s a cracker (Jon McGregor)

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 (Nathan Filer)

Beautifully crafted and deeply moving, a work of searching intelligence, unstinting honesty and disarming wit. Somehow Joe Dunthorne manages to wrest compassion and human connection from some of the bleakest moments of modern history. This is a revelatory book (Ekow Eshun)

A deft, brilliant, deceptive book, somehow both devastating and hilarious. Dunthorne's family story is the best kind: both personal and universal, told with the darkest comedy and deep humanity. It is also a version of history at its most slippery, shaped by the flawed memories of the people we love and our own wayward attempts to make sense of them (Sophie Elmhirst)

Brave, beautiful and incisive, an 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)