Joe Dunthorne’s lessons in chemistry

Children of Radium is a detective thriller set in Berlin , Ankara and New York .

It's a book about what happens when a “comforting fantasy’, passed down through generations, is shattered by reality.

It is also, given the grimness of the subject matter, a funny, heart-warming and engaging page-turner.

Children of Radium, by Joe Hamish Hamilton , is a new book by the author of a Holocaust survivor.

Hamish 's great-grandfather was mixing toxic compounds to make them more deadly.

The book is full of bizarre juxtapositions too strange to be fiction.

It is a reminder of what it meant to be Jewish and German in the 1930s : smashed synagogues and statelessness.