It seems like every family has a bit of ancestral folklore, and Joe Dunthorne’s is better than most, a tale of his great-grandfather Siegfried spiriting his family away from Nazi Germany in 1935, ...

Philip Larkin's bitter poem about the influence of our parents — "They [mess] you up, your mum and dad" — could be the epigraph of Joe Dunthorne's second novel, "Wild Abandon." But Dunthorne marinates ...

As a little girl growing up in post-World War I Germany, Joe Dunthorne’s grandmother was among the many who brushed their teeth with irradiated toothpaste. Doramad, his grandmother’s family brand of ...

In the opening pages of Children of Radium, Joe Dunthorne describes the ring his mother gave him on his wedding day, an “oval bloodstone, black with flecks of red”. She told him that it was smuggled ...

The novelist’s debut memoir, Children of Radium (Scribner, Apr.), uncovers how his great-grandfather, a Jewish chemist, ended up making weapons for the Nazis. What inspired you to write this book? I ...

The novelist was researching his grandmother’s escape from Nazi Germany when he came across a startling confession made by her father at the end of his life... My grandmother grew up brushing her ...

It was a happy setting for an author intrigued by the perpetual weirdness of human behaviour. There has been quite a wait for The Adulterants, a contemporary tour of several of the deadly sins, but it ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Every family has stories that are passed down the generations, worn so smooth by retelling that the facts ...

The novelist thought his great-grandfather’s memoir would be a story to be proud of. He found something else. By Rachel Cunliffe What is an inheritance? For the Welsh novelist Joe Dunthorne, the ...

BBC Sounds have announced two brand new commissions which will air in spring as part of the popular history strand We are delighted to add not one but two new history series to our popular history ...