by Joan London
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2016
208 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
Winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Award for Fiction
Joan London, author of Gilgamesh, gives her readers an immensely satisfying and generous-hearted story about displacement, recovery, resilience, and love with The Golden Age.
Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold's family, Hungarian Jews, escape the perils of World War II to the safety of Australia in the 1940s. But not long after their arrival Frank is diagnosed with polio. He is sent to a sprawling children's hospital called The Golden Age, where he meets Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, a girl who radiates pure light. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one another's rehabilitation, facing the perils of polio and adolescence hand in hand, and scandalizing the prudish staff of The Golden Age.
Meanwhile, Frank and Elsa's parents must cope with their changing realities. Elsa's mother Margaret, who has given up everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughter's sickness. Frank's parents, transplants to Australia from a war-torn Europe, are isolated newcomers in a country that they do not love and that does not seem to love them. Frank's mother Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home. But her husband, Meyer, slowly begins to free himself from the past and integrate into a new society.
With tenderness and humor, The Golden Age tells a deeply moving story about illness and recovery. It is a book about learning to navigate the unfamiliar, about embracing music, poetry, death, and, most importantly, life.
Awards for The Golden Age:
2015 Patrick White Literary Award
2015 Kibble Literary Award
Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction
New South Wales Premier's People's Choice Award
"Starred Review. The novel was a recipient of multiple awards in London's native Australia, and deservedly so: it is pretty much perfect." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Her writing is cleareyed, generous-hearted, never sentimental... every character, however minor, comes to life in these pages. Like her fictional pianist, London is a virtuoso." - Kirkus
"The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the divinity of the connections between them." - The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
"The Golden Age is London's most accomplished and keenly felt work to date...her affection for her characters may be contagious." - The Australian (Australia)
"A brilliant display of life and change: the transition between war and peace, between love and permission, between terrible paralysis of various kinds and movement." - The Monthly (Australia)
"The Golden Age carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become." - Sydney Review of Books (Australia)
This information about The Golden Age was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joan London is a bookseller and author living in Perth. She is the author of two short story collections, Sister Ships, which won The Age Book of the Year award, and Letter to Constantine, which won the Steele Rudd Award as well as the West Australian Premier's Award for Fiction, and three novels, Gilgamesh, The Good Parents, and The Golden Age.
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