Children of Radium

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 O’Hagan

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

Andrew O'Hagan, Financial Times

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 Levi’s Gray Zone, the territory this book explores is defined by its ambiguity and complexity, and we are lucky to have a writer of Dunthorne’s enormous gifts to lead us on the trail

Sam Lipsyte

Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey

Philippe Sands

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

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

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

A staggering, genre-defining achievement . . . Children of Radium is delivered with radical honesty and self-deprecation that I found both intellectually and spiritually instructive. The opposite of propaganda has to be this persistent, courageous and meticulous search for the truth, against the odds, against the efforts of entire states, and against our instincts to present things in as mild and flattering a light as possible . . . Utterly moving, urgent and nuanced by the wisest of hearts

Luke Kennard

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

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

Children of Radium is an exhilarating exploration of legacy. Unburying family secrets—especially secrets this big, this profound—is painstaking & 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

A funny and moving family history that troubles even as it entertains

Monocle

This memoir displays Dunthorne’s gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher . . . [He] confronts gaps in the historical record . . . combining ironic detachment with horror

Los Angeles Times

Enigmatic, self-deprecating, enjoyable . . . [Dunthorne] brings a novelist's eye for detail to Children of Radium

Sunday Times

Truly moving . . . [Joe Dunthorne] uncovers deeply uncomfortable truths . . . This is a story of cumulative denialism [and] many unanswerable questions

Literary Review

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

[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

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

John Self, Financial 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

Dunthorne’s bracing memoir confronts us with a family legacy as unsettling as the warning sign posted outside the fenced-off poison factory: "Risk of death—Do not enter."

Wall Street Journal

It would be wrong to say that Joe Dunthorne is in search of "the truth" because he is too perceptive an observer to believe that there are hard, unshifting truths to be found. He goes in search of experience, trying to put himself in the place of his grandfather and others who lived through these times... He is an excellent companion throughout, telling the story with a mix of comic timing, wry self-deprecation, and genuine appreciation for the strange and difficult lives people live

Chicago Tribune

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