A family memoir like no other, from the author of cult classic Submarine.

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 The only problem was that the old man had already written the book of his life – an unpublished memoir so dense and rambling that none of his living descendants had attempted to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally cracked open the manuscript, 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 – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste, and which forces Dunthorne to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family.

Children of Radium 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.