About

The team at Mr B's is delighted to welcome novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne to Mr B's to discuss his extraordinary non-fiction debut, The Children of Radium.

Part family history, part wild heist, The Children of Radium tells the story of Joe's great-grandfather Siegfried, an eccentric scientist and Jewish refugee who invented radioactive toothpaste. When Joe decides to read the 2000-page manuscript his 'jolly grandpa' left behind, he uncovers an incredible story that stretches around the world and through the 20th century…

Joe is previously the author of the poetry collection O Positive and three novels, including the critically acclaimed Submarine, which was adapted for film by Richard Ayoade.

About the book:

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 The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it.

And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, 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, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one 'jolly grandpa' with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it?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.

'A gripping story of family secrets and chemical warfare [and] a tale of one writer's search for a reliable past… Joe Dunthorne has written a contemporary classic' – Andrew O'Hagan

'Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey' – Philippe Sands