Joe Dunthorne’s lessons in chemistry

Joe Dunthorne’s lessons in chemistry

What is an inheritance? For the Welsh novelist Joe Dunthorne, the inheritance he received from his great-grandfather, Siegfried Merzbacher, came in the form of a bloodstone ring that had “escaped the Nazis” and a German passport. In his family history, Children of Radium, it is Siegfried’s story that Dunthorne sets out to tell. The story of a Jewish chemist who lived with his wife and two children in Berlin and injected radium into his gums in h…