Product Description

As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming, her children are almost grown, and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air.

But none of the guests at Rehana's party can foresee what will happen in the days and months ahead. For this is 1971 in East Pakistan, a country on the brink of war. And this family's life is about to change forever.

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 chaos of this era, everyone—from student protesters to the country's leaders, from rickshaw'wallahs to the army's soldiers—must make choices. And as she struggles to keep her family safe, Rehana will be forced to face a heartbreaking dilemma.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29744 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

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.)
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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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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Wendy Smith

Tahmima Anam's first novel is a generous act of creative empathy. Born in Bangladesh four years after the nation won its independence from Pakistan, the author grew up abroad and now lives in London. Yet from her family's stories and her own research, she has crafted a compelling tale steeped in her native land's diverse culture. A Golden Age chronicles a young widow's hesitant heroism during the convulsive year 1971, when rebels, including the widow's teenaged son and daughter, battle an army employing genocide and torture to subdue Pakistan's breakaway eastern region.

Rehana Haque is an unlikely hero. A prologue set in 1959 shows her losing a custody battle with her wealthy brother-in-law Faiz. "Poor, and friendless," 26-year-old Rehana lacks the confidence to assert that her children belong with their mother. When the judge asks, "What would your husband want?" she admits, "He would want them to be safe." Faiz convinces the judge that Maya and Sohail are not safe in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital city, roiled by strikes and demonstrations; they are sent to live with him in West Pakistan, a thousand miles away. The prologue closes with Rehana's rueful memories of her husband, a cautious insurance executive who foresaw and forestalled every possible danger to his children and his much younger wife -- except the sudden heart attack that left Rehana unable to prevent Faiz from taking them.

Twelve years later, as the main action begins, Rehana is preparing the party she throws each year to celebrate the day in 1961 when she brought her children back to Dhaka. How she got the money to reclaim them remains a mystery for the moment, but we see immediately how fiercely devoted she is to Maya and Sohail, how anxious to shelter them from all harm. Days later, when the election that promised greater autonomy for Bangladesh is annulled and Pakistani troops descend on Dhaka, Maya and Sohail, now 17 and 19 years old, unhesitatingly join the resistance movement. Their mother simply hopes that these troubles will soon blow over, that "the children would go on being her children . . . living ordinary, unexceptional lives."

Though the author cogently sketches the necessary historical background, she doesn't unduly concern herself with political specifics. Her novel tells the story of one woman's personal odyssey. It's Rehana's love for her children that initially embroils her in the resistance, her fundamental decency that leads to her deeper involvement. When Sohail asks to use the second house on her property as a hiding place for guerrillas and weapons, she agrees. She's proud that her son is "so fine, so ready to take charge. This was who she had hoped he would become, even if she had never imagined that her son, or the world, would come to this."

Her relations with Maya are thornier. Anam paints a nuanced portrait of a prickly daughter and maladroit mother that will ring true to any parent of an adolescent, though the circumstances here are grimly particular to a country at war. The discovery that Maya's best friend has been raped, tortured and murdered by soldiers shocks Rehana into supporting her daughter's decision to take a more active role in the resistance.

It also gives her the backbone to stand up to her brother-in-law, who's involved in the army's brutal repression. "Surely you don't want this on your conscience," she tells Faiz, extorting his help to get a neighbor's son out of jail. The young man has been tortured so severely that he dies shortly after Rehana rescues him, and she slips across the border to India, fearful that Faiz may have betrayed her. The misery she sees in a refugee camp outside Calcutta reinforces Rehana's commitment to the struggle for independence.

Readable and well crafted, A Golden Age bears some traces of its first-time author's inexperience. In particular, Rehana's evolution from a fearful mother to a strong, resourceful woman seems too smooth. Wouldn't she have been more frightened about allowing her house to be used as a guerrilla base? Would her relationship with Maya have been so quickly transformed into easily expressed affection? Would she have been that blunt with Faiz, whose army ties give him so much power? This warmhearted novel might have plumbed more deeply the potential for evil in even the most honorable people confronted with life-threatening choices.

When it counts the most, however, Anam does not flinch from complexity and horror of a more intimate nature than the details of atrocities. Nursing a wounded rebel in her home, Rehana falls in love with the first person who has ever bothered to ask about her deepest feelings, a man with whom she can share her most shameful secret. The closing pages achieve real tragic stature as we see Rehana quietly mourning on the day that Bangladesh will finally achieve independence. Amid the crowd singing "How I love you, my golden Bengal," she is surely not the only one who must live with the knowledge of what she did during a cruel war.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Luminous and poignant; a wonderful novel!
Set mainly in the 1970s against the backdrop of Bangladesh's Liberation War. Tahmina Anam's luminous debut novel is the story of Rehana Haque who is as a recent widow is left with little family or financial support and loses her children to their father's family. Rehana tries desperately to improve her financial situation to get her children back. However Rehana lives continuously with the guilt of this loss, even after the children are recovered. Women everywhere can identify with Rehana's love of her country, her struggle to keep her children safe despite tremendous odds and their struggles during wartime and choices they are forced to make.

For this meticulously researched novel, Bangladesh-born, American-educationed, Tahmima Anam was inspired by her parents who were freedom fighters during the war. For the benefit of her research, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters. This all shows as the background for this poignant story adds to its emotional impact for a riveting read that will stay with the reader a long time after the last page is turned. Highly recommended.

Wonderful view of colonial Sri Lanka!
Having visited Sri Lanka several years ago, I found this book fascinating, funny and informative about the different people that have made their home there in the last several hundred years. The characters are deeply etched with humor and affection. Really good read.

Keeping Family Together In A War Torn Country
"A Golden Age" is a novel by Tahmima Anam, which is about Rehana Haque, a woman who became a widow at a young age, and who is finishing raising her two children in East Pakistan as the events leading up to the Bangladesh War of Independence approach. Dr. Anam effectively counters the difficulties of the family with those experienced in East Pakistan during that period in time.

The prologue is set in March of 1959, as Rehana writes to her dead husband (Iqbal) of how she has lost their children to his brother and his wife in Lahore (West Pakistan). Rehana is resolved to get her children back, and this short prologue is very effective in covering key memories and events through its non-linear telling. The secret of how Rehana managed to get the money is not revealed at this time.

The novel them jumps to March of 1971 on the anniversary of the day when she got her children back. On this day, she throws a party to celebrate that anniversary, and Tahmima Anam does an effective job of introducing key characters as well as telling the story of how Rehana was able to get her children back. The politics are also brought into the story through conversation at the party, and then the postponement of the assembly and the denial of the office of Prime Minister to Sheikh Mujib. Both Rehana's son Sohail, and daughter Maya are both strong supporters of the independence movement, but Rehana is more concerned about her family than politics.

The war then comes with the attack on Dhaka, and the lives of Rehana and her family and friends are forever changed. Everything is being pulled apart by the events in the country. Sohail is drawn towards joining the revolution, while Maya also works to support it in Dhaka. Rehana starts to realize that she will need to choose sides if she wants to keep her family together, at least in spirit.

As the story proceeds, Rehana finds herself becoming a supporter of the independence movement. She takes in a wanted injured man who has saved her son's life and help nurse him back to health, she allows the burial of items the independence needs in her yard. On a personal note, she is forced to go to ask for a captured man's freedom from her brother-in-law, the same one who had taken her children away from her so many years ago.

Rehana is forced to move to Calcutta, the city of her birth, to see Maya who has started writing articles in support of independence and attacking the actions of West Pakistan. There she become involved in helping out at the refugee camp, where she finds one of her friends, Mrs. Sengupta, in a horrible state and who has apparently lost her husband and her son.

There is a certain type of symmetry to the story. We learn how the first man she loved nearly cost Rehana her kids and how she had to do whatever she could to get them back, but in this story she has to let her children go in order to keep them. It is also the second man whom she loved, even if for such a brief moment, who ultimately helps her keep her children.

This story works, because of the effective use of the backdrop of the war for Bangladesh's independence. The characters and situations are believable, and the story telling is well done. Perhaps the best thing about the story is that no character is portrayed as perfect, nor are any of the significant characters viewed as without any humanity. This is a very good debut novel, and it will be interesting to see how Tahmima Anam follows this one up. From the information on the back of the book, "A Golden Age" is meant as one of a trilogy of books, and one can only hope that the high standards set with this one are maintained in the novels to come.