A Golden Age

By Tahmima Anam
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061478758, 304pp.)

Publication Date: January 2009

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover

Categories: General

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the Fall '09/Winter '10 Reading Group List

Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in Paris, Bangkok, and New York. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her writing has been published in Granta, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. A Golden Age, her first novel, was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. She lives in London and Dhaka.

“A glittering debut…Readers of Khaled Hosseini’s brutal but magnificent A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS will find similar pleasures in Anam’s book.”
-St. Petersburg Times

“An illumination on how far a woman will go to protect her children’s bodies and souls . . . Anam reminds us most forcefully that a mother’s love for her child is the most powerful and frightening weapon there is.”
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Moving…Full of beauty…Both a riveting tale and a lament for the atrocities the people suffered during Pakistan’s invasion in 1971 …The novel just keeps getting stronger as it progresses…building to a doozy of an ending.”
-Christian Science Monitor

“A vibrant first novel…A story that is both intimately close to the family and large enough to encompass a revolution.”
-Denver Post

“A GOLDEN AGE has everything an epic should have...[Anam] is able to convey the larger story of politics and war against a much smaller and more intimate story.”
-San Jose Mercury News

“Written with marvelous control and understatement, this first novel impressed me with its maturity.”
-Women's Review of Books

“Readable and well crafted . . . Compelling . . . A generous act of creative empathy . . . Anam does not flinch from complexity and horror of a more intimate nature than the details of atrocities.”
-Washington Post Book World

“Anam’s story gains momentum as its characters take shape…Readers will feel the depth of this nation’s crisis through its people, and the conclusion delivers a surprising blow.”
-Rocky Mountain News

“An impressive debut...Rehana’s metamorphosis encapsulates her country’s tragedy and makes for an immersive, wrenching narrative.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Tahmima Anam’s startlingly accomplished and gripping novel describes not only the tumult of a great historical event…but also the small but heroic struggles of individuals living in the shadow of revolution and war.”
-Pankaj Mishra

“Told with great skill and urgency…Spellbinding in its sense of quiet foreboding…Anam has written a story about powerful events. But it is her descriptions of the small, unheralded moments, the ones slipping effortlessly between the interstices of major conflagrations, which truly touch the heart.”
-San Francisco Chronicle

“In this striking debut novel . . . Anam deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment while lyrically depicting the way in which the struggle for freedom allows Rehana to discover both her strength and her heart.”
-The New Yorker

“eventful, exotic, intelligent, and romantic”
-Entertainment Weekly

“Compelling…Anam is cracking open secrets, personal and political, to let the healing begin.”
-O magazine

“[A] wonderful addition to the growing list of novels that seek, in some way, to help us understand the history and people of South Asia.”
-USA Today