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: #169070 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

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

Wonderful story of a woman's transition into independence
This novel tracks one woman's experience of the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence. During the course of the novel, Rehana Haque gradually changes from a mourning widow unable to care for her own children into a fiercely independent and brave supporter of the revolution. Rehana's transition--dramatic and yet entirely credible--is this book's distinguishing feature and is never overshadowed by the surrounding drama of the revolution. Anam's delicate prose adds humor and lightness to what otherwise could have become a heavy and depressing read. Entirely worthwhile.

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.