As the leaves start to turn, Danielle Goldstein recommends you pick up one of these new page-turners
Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance
by Joe Dunthorne (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)
How would you feel if you discovered that a member of your family made chemical weapons for the Nazis? This was the dilemma faced by Welsh author Joe Dunthorne after discovering the unpublished memoir of his German Jewish great-grandfather, Siegfried Merzbacher. To help him uncover the full story, he embarks on a trail that takes him from secret radioactive German sites to a mountainous Turkish region that was the scene of a deadly gas attack on Kurdish villagers. Along the way he interviews his family and grapples with an overwhelming sense of generational guilt.
The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British 20th Century
by Owen Hatherley (Allen Lane, £35)
The impact that émigrés from Europe to the UK in the 1930s had on British society has been well documented, but London-based historian Owen Hatherley delves deeper into what the theatremaker Bertolt Brecht dubbed the 'verfremdungseffekt' ('alienation effect'). He looks into artists and intellectuals, from big names such as the architect Erno Goldfinger to lesser-known luminaries such as the sociologist Ruth Glass, to explain the influence that this clashing of European modernism with English moderation had on what we think of as classic British culture.
My Name is Stramer
by Mikołaj Łoziński, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Pushkin Press, £18.99)
In his third novel, the Polish writer and photographer Mikołaj Łoziński explores the everyday lives of a Jewish family in the lead up to World War II. The story is set in the Polish town of Tarnów, where we meet Nathan and Rywka Stramer, along with their six offspring, as they dream of trips to the seaside and get-rich-quick schemes. While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the centre of their raucous family life, national conflicts begin to escalate and something sinister creeps into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand. It is a vivid and, at times, humorous portrait of a family and society on the brink of devastating change.
By Danielle Goldstein
This article appears in the forthcoming Autumn 2025 issue of JR.