Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker
In the tradition of 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 What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.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?
“A galvanizing and revelatory saga” (Booklist) and “a slippery marvel” (The Observer, London), Children of Radium is a deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.
"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] lively memoir . . . At once a family history and an account of the author’s piecing together of that history." —The New Yorker
"[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 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." —Sophie Elmhirst, New York Times bestselling author of A Marriage at Sea
“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
