Children of Radium

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