Submarine's Joe Dunthorne for Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

'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 is the author of three novels and one collection of poetry, including the cult classic Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award.

Joe joins us for Children of Radium, an off-beat, irreverent and subversive Jewish family memoir about convenient delusions and unsayable truths. This 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.

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The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life - an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it.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

"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

"Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey."~ Philippe Sands

"A staggering, genre-defining achievement . . . Children of Radium is delivered with radical honesty and self-deprecation that I found both intellectually and spiritually instructive... Utterly moving, urgent and nuanced by the wisest of hearts." ~ Luke Kennard