A Golden Age: A Novel (P.S.) [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Tahmima Anam (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 6, 2009 | Series: P.S.

Rehana Haque, a young widow, blissfully prepares for the party she will host for her son and daughter. But this is 1971 in East Pakistan, and change is in the air.

Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence, A Golden Age is a story of passion and revolution; of hope, faith, and unexpected heroism in the midst of chaos—and of one woman's heartbreaking struggle to keep her family safe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The experiences of a woman drawn into the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence illuminate the conflict's wider resonances in Anam's impressive debut, the first installment in a proposed trilogy. Rehana Haque is a widow and university student in Dhaka with two children, 17-year-old daughter Maya and 19-year-old son Soheil. As she follows the daily patterns of domesticity—cooking, visiting the cemetery, marking religious holidays—she is only dimly aware of the growing political unrest until Pakistani tanks arrive and the fighting begins. Suddenly, Rehana's family is in peril and her children become involved in the rebellion. The elegantly understated restraint with which Anam recounts ensuing events gives credibility to Rehana's evolution from a devoted mother to a woman who allows her son's guerrilla comrades to bury guns in her backyard and who shelters a Bengali army major after he is wounded. The reader takes the emotional journey from atmospheric scenes of the marketplace to the mayhem of invasion, the ruin of the city, evidence of the rape and torture of Hindus and Bengali nationalists, and the stench and squalor of a refugee camp. Rehana's metamorphosis encapsulates her country's tragedy and makes for an immersive, wrenching narrative. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

In this striking début novel, set in the nineteen-seventies, a young widow and her children become caught up in Bangladesh’s war for independence. Rehana exists on the edge of things: a native of Calcutta, she was resettled in Dhaka by her husband and speaks Urdu, the language of West Pakistan, as fluently as Bengali, the language of restive East Pakistan—soon to be Bangladesh. Her children, though, are fervent patriots, joining in student marches and making speeches; as rhetoric becomes revolution, her son joins a guerrilla group and her daughter decamps to Calcutta to write tracts exposing the atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army. 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.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006147875X
• ASIN: B003F76K0Y
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1975. She attended Mount Holyoke College, and received a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. The Good Muslim is the second novel, following A Golden Age, in her Bengal Trilogy. She lives in London.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Would make a great movie, destined to be a classic December 1, 2007

By Clare Chu TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

War novels like Gone with the Wind, Sophie's Choice, The Book Thief to name a few, capture the stresses and choices that ordinary people are forced to make as the brutality and deprivation of war, occupation, captivity, that change the ordinary circumstances of life into a living nightmare. This book is no different.

The book starts with a prologue where the widow Rehana sits at her husband's grave and tells him that she has lost the children. Because of her poverty, her husband's brother and childless sister-in-law have taken custody of Sohail and Maya, Rehana's 7 and 5 year olds. Even though they are gone for only a year, Rehana feels in her heart the yearning gap of that year and devotes herself totally to her children.

Every year, they have a party where they celebrate the children's return. March 1971 was no different. The party had become a routine, the same guests, Rehana's neighbors, a tenant family from India, the gin-rummy ladies and her daughter's friend. They are celebrating and optimistic of the future. But within a few short weeks, tanks rolled into Dhaka, refugees start streaming out, massacres occur in the city, and her children are drawn into the resistance movement. Life is anything but ordinary when Rehana is drawn into the resistance by her son and daughter. Faced with her guilt at how she lost them for a short while when they were young, and the secret of how she was able to bring them back, Rehana goes along with their efforts, hiding guns and supplies in her home and harboring and caring for a wounded major that at first she regards as a nuisance.

She would like nothing better than to retreat into her routine, her shell, sitting at her late husband's grave and speaking to him, and lying to him and herself about the normalcy of her life, ignoring her daughter's cold shoulder and indifference, and her own guilt at the shameful acts she took to bring her children back. But as the weeks went by, taking care of the major who only greeted her with silent eyes, she begins to open up to him, telling him of her secrets, as if to atone for them and he silently bears her secrets for her.

The war tears Rehana's circle apart, lives tragically destroyed, destinies changed. Rehana meets her former tenant in a refugee camp, a walking shell, with nothing left inside her except sorrow, for the choice she made, she'll pay with tears the rest of her life.

At the end, Rehana herself makes a heartbreaking choice, and even though the war ends a few weeks later, there is no victory, only sorrow in Rehana's heart. As the rest of the city celebrates Rehana speaks to her dead husband, telling him that this time, she did not lose her children.

This is a very poignant novel with plenty of action, raw emotions, youthful enthusiasm, and the painful legacies of war, and the birth of a nation.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Fairly good story, but flawed writing November 27, 2007

By Darshan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

A wealth of very talented authors such as Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali, and Jhumpa Lahiri have made South Asian women writers the hot ticket. This book, Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age, is one that follows in that wake. I feel Anam has some natural story-telling ability and will probably mature into an excellent novelist, but overall this work has a large number of weaknesses. While I often appreciate a novel that is written in simple language, Anam's book is often unpolished. The book is filled with awkward phrases and metaphors that don't work. ("the blood leaping in their skins" "He entered the room sleekly." "The weather was a gale in her stomach."). However, to Anam's credit, she does successfully weave in a motif of sugar imagery which felt interesting and original.

The book is also too short, a complaint I almost never make. But back story is ignored so that the reader doesn't feel the impact the characters do when a girl decides to marry someone besides the main character's son. We also can't experience much of what the main character goes through when she loses her children to her brother-in-law for a year as we are not exposed to the extent of her love for her kids until too far into the novel.

Descriptive detail is also spotty. The protagonist, Rehana, proclaims that Dhaka is her city and very much a part of her, yet we hardly get a picture of Dhaka at all. We know there's a university, a market, some slums near the main train station, a cricket stadium, a lot of rickshaws and not much else. And it is crucial to understand why Dhaka means so much when actually the main character is from Calcutta, her children are in Lahore, and her sisters are in Karachi. Their native language is Urdu. This is not a family that comes with generations of Bengali history or even years of fond memories. Why does Rehana need Dhaka and Bangladesh?

Sloppy editing also hurts this novel. It reads "Rehana opened the Holy Book" and later on the same page "Just as Rehana was about to open the Holy Book..." There are also too many instances where the author does not adequately explain Bengali or Urdu terms which will probably alienate many Western readers.

It's difficult to weave in a lot of character development, necessary back story, and rich setting and still have the pacing to get to the guns and explosions before page 60, but I suspect a more experienced author could have done it. The book does move along at a clip, and the author keeps tensions high, but it could have been so much more gripping had the author given us the means to care deeply about her characters.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book about the Bangladesh war January 25, 2008

By Dianne Friedman

Format:Hardcover

I knew very little about the history of the country of Bangladesh and it's quest for independence and found this book to be very interesting and informative.

Also enjoyed the family story about the grieving widow Rehana and how she deals with the loss and threats to her children - this is an illuminating tale about acts of heroism during a time of war. The language in this novel is beautiful yet simple - when a novelist can lay out such complexities in a tightly written book with simple, unpretentious prose, it is a joy to read. A Golden Age gives the reader a gradual build of tension that kept me engaged and turning the page through to the end.

I think book clubs would really enjoy this book because there is lots to discuss as it relates to the extreme devotion that a mother can have for their children.