Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

By: Joe Dunthorne

Narrated by: Joe Dunthorne

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 What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.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.

Critic reviews

"In this engaging memoir, author Joe Dunthorne narrates his own investigation into the dubious moral legacy of his grandfather, a chemist whose career evolved from creating mundane consumer products to developing chemical weapons for Nazi Germany. Dunthorne’s skill as a novelist and storyteller comes through in both his prose and his narration. His tone is energetic and well suited to his conversational writing...It’s easy to listen to, and it balances the seriousness of his topic with the lighter feel of a travelogue."

One of 6 million stories that needed to be told.

The persistence of the author in researching his family’s past is as remarkable and fascinating as the family’s tragic story itself. Magnificently written and narrated, the listener will feel like they’re part of the conversation.