The Golden Age - Softcover

London, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609453328 ISBN 13: 9781609453329

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2016

Synopsis

Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold's family escaped from Hungary and the perils of WW2 to the safety of Australia, but not long after their arrival Frank is diagnosed with polio. Sent to a sprawling children's hospital called The Golden Age, he finds Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, and a vocation for poetry. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fuelling one another's rehabilitation and facing the perils of polio and adolescence hand in hand. Meanwhile Frank and Elsa's parents must cope with their changing realities. Margaret, who has sacrificed everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughter's illness. Frank's parents are isolated newcomers in a country they don't love. Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home, while her husband Meyer slowly begins to free himself from the past and find his place in the Perth of the early 1950s. From the closed wards of The Golden Age narratives spin out, overlaid and assembled so to link disparate characters, milieus, generations and their respective fates.
A moving story about transition between illness and recovery, childhood and maturity, life and death.

About this title

Review

"The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the divinity of the connections between them." -- Helen Elliott, The Syndney Morning Herald

"The Golden Age is London's most accomplished and keenly felt work to date...her affection for her characters may be contagious." -- Geordie Williamson, The Australian

"Fearless, graceful and deeply benevolent." -- Helen Garner, novelist

"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." -- Brenda Walker, The Monthly

"The Golden Age carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become."
-- Tegan Bennett Daylight, Sydney Review of Books

Praise for Joan London

"[Gilgamesh] captures the romance of wanderlust like no other novel I have read."
-- Maureen Freely, "The Guardian"

"[The Good Parents] a dark and lovely work is both a novel of ideas and one of emotions...the mystery of enthrallment only deepens, irradiated by London's gorgeous prose." -- Roxana Robinson, The New York Times

"London's prose is a seamlessly shifting blend of poetry, pathos, and humor." --The Washington Post

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1609453328
• ISBN 13: 9781609453329
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224