CHILDREN OF RADIUM

Off beat irreverent and subversive a Jewish family memoir about convenient delusions and unsayable truths from the acclaimed author of the cult classic novel Submarine 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 HaganJoe 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to pull off a heist on his own home The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life an unpublished two thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it And as it turned out when Joe finally read the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 knowledg