Submarine

'Are we making a bomb?' 
'This is a trust exercise, like in drama,' she says. 
'Are we making a bomb as a trust exercise?' 
 
Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate is terrified that his family is falling apart. He fears for his depressed father and is convinced that his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher. Deciding that it is down to him alone to save his parents' marriage, Oliver sets out on a campaign to rescue it while also embarking on an even more ambitious goal: to lose his virginity before he's sixteen to the seductive but slightly pyromaniacal Jordana . . . 
 
'The sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming of age since The Catcher in the Rye' Independent 
 
'A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent' The Times

A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent

Dunthorne captures the mores of Britain today better than novelists twice his age

Brilliant . . . laugh-out-loud enjoyable. The sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming-of-age since The Catcher in the Rye

Transplants The Catcher in the Rye to south Wales . . . Dunthorne can make you laugh like you did during double physics on a wet Wednesday afternoon

A richly amusing tale of mock GCSEs, sex, death and challenging vocabulary . . . Excruciatingly funny incidents and cracking gags

Excellent . . . the wonderful, Day-Glo certainties of adolescence have rarely been so brilliantly laid out

Dunthorne captures the mores of Britain today better than novelists twice his age.  He is sure to write books that declare more than their vocabulary

Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of three novels and one collection of poetry, including Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. Children of Radium is his first work of non-fiction. He lives in London. 
 
www.joedunthorne.com

Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ("Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner") and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher, "a hippy-looking twonk", he embarks on a hilariously misguided campaign to bring the family back together. Meanwhile, he is also trying to lose his virginity - before he turns sixteeen - to his pyromaniac girlfriend Jordana. Will Oliver succeed in either aim? Submerge yourself in Submarine and find out . . .

The Adulterants

From the wickedly funny author of Submarine comes a hilarious new tragicomedy - a screwball tale of millennial angst, pre-midlife crises and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties. 
 
'Blisteringly funny and brimming with caustic charm - a joyous diagnosis of our modern ills that made me laugh out loud even when it was breaking my heart' Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies 
 
Ray is not a bad guy. He mostly did not cheat on his heavily pregnant wife. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. His career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal but he dreams of making a difference one day. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse. 
 
Brace yourself for an encounter with the modern everyman. Enter the world of ironic misanthropy and semi-ironic underachievement, of competitively sensitive men, catastrophic open marriages, and lots of Internet righteousness. With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial. 
 
'Every lost generation needs its memorial and now at last we have The Adulterants. It's very sad and very funny and written with an innocence that in fact is diabolical' Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid and Cute

There is a chortle-inducing moment on almost every page... Dunthorne is not only one of contemporary fiction's funniest voices but also one of its most generous and perceptive

Dunthorne is a superbly economical writer... He is also properly funny. There are several snort-through-your-nose moments. But throughout, the novel's comedy is always balanced by insight and poignancy

The Adulterants is thrust-the-book-at-the-person-next-to-you hilarious

Joe Dunthorne is one of our best young writers

Bristles with a deliciously sour, dyspeptic humour and is excellent at skewering the lifestyle habits of a liberal-minded middle-class

Perfectly formed... a pin-sharp skewering of a certain type of modern urban thirtysomething male, trapped in a protracted adolescent state. It's one not to be missed

The Adulterants, from its punning title onwards, is brilliantly knowing about its knowingness. It knows the only way we'll tolerate a narrator as annoying as Ray is to punish him for the very virtues that make him a good narrator - nosiness and eloquence

A sharp satire of contemporary London and the modern urban male

Blisteringly funny and brimming with caustic charm - a joyous diagnosis of our modern ills that made me laugh out loud even when it was breaking my heart

Dark, beautifully wry, and side-splittingly excruciating, The Adulterants is a triumph of voice and vision

A tale of modern manhood, full of malaise, melancholy and wryly funny observations

A richly illuminating comedy of disappointment, uproarious and mournful, that places Joe Dunthorne triumphantly in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and (that other Swansea resident) Kingsley Amis. A deft, brilliant, surprising joyride

Joe Dunthorne's new book is a pleasure - I was very fortunate to get to read his book Submarine early and reading this one was equally thrilling. I owe him a great deal ( but refuse to repay him)

Smartly written, The Adulterants riffs on London's housing crisis, competitively sensitive men and social media with wry insight

Ray's life is not going to plan. He's just cheated on his heavily pregnant wife. He secretly despises all of his friends. His career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal and he spends his afternoons churning out listicles in his pants. But Ray is about to learn that no matter how low you sink, things can always get worse... 
 
The Adulterants is an uproarious tale of competitively sensitive men and catastrophic open marriages, riots on the streets of London and Internet righteousness, and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties. With lacerating wit and wry affection, Joe Dunthorne dissects the urban millennial psyche of a man too old to be an actual millennial.

Wild Abandon

Wild Abandon is Joe Dunthorne's outrageously funny novel of life in a Welsh commune. 
 
Kate and Albert, sister and brother, are not yet the last two human beings on earth, but Albert has high hopes. The secluded communal farm they grew up on is - after twenty years - disintegrating, along with their parents' marriage. They both try to escape: Kate, at seventeen, to suburbia and Albert, at eleven, into preparations for the end of the world. 
 
However, Don, the group's leader and their father, is convinced he can save everything, if only he can bring his followers into the modern age. How? By force of personality, strict self-sufficiency and a rave with a 10k soundsystem. Understandably, Albert and Kate have other ideas . . . 
 
 
 
'Populated by flawed, occasionally exasperating, lovable and, above all, thoroughly imagined characters, Wild Abandon is about what happens to children when parents become consumed by their beliefs . . . A terrific novel' Nick Hornby, Guardian, 'Books of the Year' 
 
'A joy. Warm, funny, clever' Sunday Times 
 
'An engaging, emotionally stimulating, chuckle-out-loud read' Time Out 
 
'Occupying a terrain that lies between the very British humour of Jonathan Coe and the zeitgeisty ambition of Douglas Coupland . . . insightful comic writing . . . that manages to be both tender and biting' Independent on Sunday 
 
'A creation of some genius. Dunthorne is a naturally comic writer' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Just as funny and acutely perceptive [as] Submarine' Independent 
 
 
Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. His debut poetry pamphlet was published by Faber and Faber. He lives in London. 
 
www.joedunthorne.com

An engaging, emotionally stimulating, chuckle-out-loud read

A creation of some genius. Dunthorne is a naturally comic writer

Just as funny and acutely perceptive [as] Submarine

Occupying a terrain that lies between the very British humour of Jonathan Coe and the zeitgeisty ambition of Douglas Coupland . . . insightful comic writing . . . that manages to be both tender and biting

The last day on earth is coming. Bring your own booze. 
 
Kate and Albert, sister and brother, are not yet the last two human beings on earth, but Albert has high hopes. The secluded communal farm they grew up on is - after twenty years - disintegrating, along with their parents' marriage. They both try to escape: Kate, at seventeen, to suburbia and Albert, at eleven, into preparations for the end of the world. 
 
However, Don, the group's leader and their father, is convinced he can save everything, if only he can bring his followers into the modern age. How? By force of personality, strict self-sufficiency and a rave with a 10k soundsystem. Understandably, Albert and Kate have other ideas . . .

Joe Dunthorne

The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man’s depression, “washing dishes as if trying to drown them”. A masterpiece . . . It will be huge

A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story . . . The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness

Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful . . . [Joe Dunthorne] infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book’s final quarter more profound. Remarkable

Disturbing, wry, riveting, Children of Radium tells European history like never before

Irish Times, 'Recommended Summer Reading 2025'

A nimble, questioning, entertaining book that nevertheless costs its subjects nothing in dignity . . . Dunthorne follows his material further than he might have done, taking the journey in many unexpected directions, and the book benefits from it. His account is also funnier than it has any right to be, since he is a wry guide . . . He maintains a personal touch while broadening out to tell a riveting, tentacular story

Children of Radium is more than a memoir. It’s a detective thriller set in Berlin, Ankara and New York, as Dunthorne tries to track down the truth about his great-grandfather after nearly a century of distortions. It’s a book about what happens when a “comforting fantasy”, passed down through generations, is shattered by reality. It’s a lesson in history, chemistry and genocide studies, from radioactive toothpaste to chemical warfare. It is also, I should stress given the grimness of the subject matter, a funny, heart-warming and engaging page-turner… You don’t need a personal stake in this period of history to be moved, horrified and entertained by Dunthorne’s story, which is full of bizarre juxtapositions too strange to be fiction

Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story, Children of Radium is a family memoir that records Joe Dunthorne’s discovery of just how little he knew of his German Jewish heritage, and his grandmother’s childhood escape from the Nazis . . . As revelations and ambiguities mount, the book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice, oscillating between potential indictment and mitigation

Enigmatic, self-deprecating, enjoyable . . . [Dunthorne] brings a novelist's eye for detail to Children of Radium

Spry, self-aware, irresistible . . . Dunthorne carefully fillets his vast material for the most vivid details . . . This is a valuable account which seeks neither to praise [its protagonist] nor to bury him

[An] excellent family memoir [and] a triumph of stylish prose . . . Dunthorne digs down through layers of memory and myth to uncover an unsettling story, tackling dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour . . . Children of Radium is a powerful exploration of the struggle to separate truth from the stories we want to believe. Dunthorne interrogates not just the omissions and self-deceptions in his great-grandfather's memoir, but also his own complicated motivations for revisiting his familial past

Surprising, daring, affecting... Dunthorne has found a tone that is at once predictably appalled and unpredictably amusing, wry, and self-mocking. His animated narrative voice is often funny without ever seeming facile or irreverent, and without trivializing — or losing sight of — the gravity of his subject... Beneath the book’s lively surface are a number of complex and serious themes: courage, self-delusion, conscience, the unreliability of memory, and the folly of believing romantic family stories about the past

Wry, elliptical, hair-raising... A gripping story of family secrets and chemical warfare, it is also a tale of one writer’s search for a reliable past. Deep in these pages you discover a travelogue of lucid suspicions, brilliantly pursued, where historical truths are finally brought into the light. The first-rate poet and novelist is ever-present, bringing images and psychic dimensions to the book that are simply unforgettable. Joe Dunthorne has written a contemporary classic

Devastating and brilliant. A complex but hugely readable story that ranges across the lingering half-life of twentieth century European history, all told with Joe Dunthorne’s trademark dry wit. It’s a cracker

Beautifully crafted and deeply moving, a work of searching intelligence, unstinting honesty and disarming wit. Somehow Joe Dunthorne manages to wrest compassion and human connection from some of the bleakest moments of modern history. This is a revelatory book

A funny and moving family history that troubles even as it entertains

This memoir displays Dunthorne’s gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher . . . [He] confronts gaps in the historical record . . . combining ironic detachment with horror

Truly moving . . . [Joe Dunthorne] uncovers deeply uncomfortable truths . . . This is a story of cumulative denialism [and] many unanswerable questions

Finely and gently crafted, an extraordinary and unexpected journey

An investigative memoir like no other. Written with such clear-eyed intelligence, it's by turns wryly entertaining, morally complex and, ultimately, profoundly moving. A remarkable achievement from a writer who is consistently at the top of his game

A deft, brilliant, deceptive book, somehow both devastating and hilarious. Dunthorne's family story is the best kind: both personal and universal, told with the darkest comedy and deep humanity. It is also a version of history at its most slippery, shaped by the flawed memories of the people we love and our own wayward attempts to make sense of them

It would be wrong to say that Joe Dunthorne is in search of “the truth” because he is too perceptive an observer to believe that there are hard, unshifting truths to be found. He goes in search of experience, trying to put himself in the place of his grandfather and others who lived through these times... He is an excellent companion throughout, telling the story with a mix of comic timing, wry self-deprecation, and genuine appreciation for the strange and difficult lives people live

Dunthorne’s bracing memoir confronts us with a family legacy as unsettling as the warning sign posted outside the fenced-off poison factory: “Risk of death—Do not enter.”

Moving, funny, disturbing and deeply surprising, an action-packed meditation and a moral adventure story, full of the kinds of intimate and historical contradictions we all live with in one way or another. Like Primo Levi’s Gray Zone, the territory this book explores is defined by its ambiguity and complexity, and we are lucky to have a writer of Dunthorne’s enormous gifts to lead us on the trail

Brave, beautiful and incisive, an adventure that spans countries and resonates across generations. I have read many memoirs of the war and have never encountered anything like this. Lyrical but unflinching, this is an extraordinary book

Children of Radium is an exhilarating exploration of legacy. Unburying family secrets—especially secrets this big, this profound—is painstaking & heartbreaking work. In the hands of a lesser writer, a story like this would collapse, become just a mush of uncertainty. But Dunthorne is a masterful guide, surefooted and diligent and honest and funny. We are with him, enthralled, every step of the way

A staggering, genre-defining achievement . . . Children of Radium is delivered with radical honesty and self-deprecation that I found both intellectually and spiritually instructive. The opposite of propaganda has to be this persistent, courageous and meticulous search for the truth, against the odds, against the efforts of entire states, and against our instincts to present things in as mild and flattering a light as possible . . . Utterly moving, urgent and nuanced by the wisest of hearts

A Buried Inheritance

Joe Dunthorne’s great-grandfather was a family legend: the eccentric pre-war inventor of radioactive toothpaste and the Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
Joe always knew he would write a book about this one day. The only problem was that the old man had already written the book of his life – an unpublished memoir so dense and rambling that none of his living descendants had attempted to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally cracked open the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew…

Children of Radium

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Joe Dunthorne

Praise for Children of Radium

The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man’s depression, “washing dishes as if trying to drown them”. A ...

A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story . . . The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage an ...

Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful . . . [Joe Dunthorne] infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and ...

The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man’s depression, “washing dishes as if trying to drown them”. A ...

A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story . . . The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage an ...

Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful . . . [Joe Dunthorne] infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and ...

The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . Dunthorne brings distinction and finesse to every sentence, such as when he speaks of the old man’s depression, “washing dishes as if trying to drown them”. A ...

A slippery marvel. Warm and wry, heartfelt as well as undeniably comic, narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story . . . The book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage an ...

Poignant, comic and searingly meaningful . . . [Joe Dunthorne] infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos [and] shines a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and ...

Books by Joe Dunthorne

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