Rachel Seiffert and Joe Dunthorne

Novelists Rachel Seiffert and Joe Dunthorne talk about their latest books, one a new novel set in a refugee camp at the end of World War Two and the second a biography of a great-grandfather who was a refugee from the Nazis.

Seiffert’s Once the Deed is Done is set in Northern Germany in 1945 around the end of the war. In the final days of war, Benno is witness on a snowy night to something he doesn’t understand. Peace sees Ruth arrive from London and be given charge of a refugee camp crowded with former forced labourers. She hears whispers and dark rumours about that snowy night, but the local townspeople close ranks and keep their mouths shut about what happened. Meanwhile, Benno cannot carry his secret alone. Seiffert is author of four previous novels including Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room.

Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is the story of his great-grandfather, an eccentric pre-war inventor of radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Berlin under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. The old man had written a book about his life, but it was so dense and rambling that no-one in the family had read it. Dunthorne says that when he opened the manuscript, he encountered a totally different story to the one he thought he knew. Dunthorne is author of three novels, including Submarine, adapted for film by Richard Ayoade, and a collection of poetry.