Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470567 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Original language: English
• 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

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

Would make a great movie, destined to be a classic
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.

Swept Me Up
I became totally swept up in Tahmima Anam's novel, "A Golden Age." The emphasis on the domestic family story that took place during the political unrest. Previously, my knowledge of the country has been most influenced by the George Harrison's The Concert for Bangladesh with the starving refugee picture on the cover. I read in the news about the flooding during monsoon season as happened this year, but otherwise know little about the country. Rehana Haque's story swept me up. It becomes universal and easy to relate to because its largest themes are about family relationship, something we can understand no matter what our culture or religion. Rehana's devotion to her son Sohail and her daughter Maya kept me gripped to the page. During Sohail's joining the resistance and burying guns beneath the rose bushes, it had me biting my nails with suspense. The sequence as Rehana flees to Calcutta and observes her daughter as a devoted and efficient worker highlighted how families change as children grow into adults. Rehana's sparse but tasteful romance with the Major brought just a whisper of joy into the midst of such tragedy. I found Anam's prose sweeping and moving. Bravo!

(3.5) "She would have moved through the world... trying to find the thing that would deny her most."

In East Pakistan in 1971, Rehana Haque is celebrating the anniversary of her children's return, the guns of war sounding on the horizon, the coming independence of Bangladesh as yet a dream in the minds of revolutionaries. But Rehana has restricted her needs and dreams to her household, to the lives of her children, seventeen-year-old Maya and nineteen-year old Sohail. Soon after the death of Rehana's husband, the children were removed from her home by her brother-in-law until such time as the mother could prove herself capable of providing adequately for their care. Now, nearly a decade later, Rehana is still overwhelmed with gratitude that her children are safe and happy with her, even though she never speaks of the shameful act that was necessary to achieve her goal, the return of her dear children.

It is telling that this mother, clinging to the past, refers to "the children" as if they are forever captured in their youth and innocence, denying the fact that both are politically active, Maya flirting with the politics of her close friends in university and Sohail anxious to join the ranks of the other young men fighting for their country's freedom from Pakistani rule. The young people eagerly embrace the future, while Rehana remains married to her fears, at the same time recognizing that she is helpless to change whatever decisions her son and daughter make on behalf of their country. A woman who would be content to spend the rest of her days in the quiet rituals of home and family, the unpredictable and dangerous is deeply unsettling to Rehana, whose only identity- other than widow- is as a mother. Passive in the face of their demands, she loses any ability to deny them, complicit in their preparations for war.

Tethered to the earth and her memories, Rehana is unintentionally heroic on behalf of those in the village caught in the crosshairs of the struggle; she remains, in fact, a simple woman with few expectations other than the safety of her children and devotion to her friends. An unexpected romance gives her comfort in the fierce battles that follow, a brief sojourn into a different life ("the man... who lived in her house for ninety-six days and who passed through her small life like a storm"); but soon enough Rehana is called back to duty, a short sojourn in an Indian refugee camp that drives her home to her village and a harsh decision that is unavoidable for her son's survival. Rehana becomes part of the greater cause, not through any grandiose designs for Bangladesh, but through expedience and a genuine concern for the fate of others, a steadying force for those uprooted from their homes, terrified by grief and loss.

A survivor of the revolution, Rehana is a part of this evolving society, painted here in all its bloody colors, her very tenacity and respect for duty providing the essential heartbeat of a new country. The political landscape is defined by those who wield power, but the fabric of Rehana's world is created by those, like her, who join together in hope and healing: "We have to find ways to exist in a country without war." Luan Gaines/ 2007.