A story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life, The Golden Age comes from one of Australia’s most loved novelists, Joan London.
It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, a refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At The Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond.
The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families.
Written in Joan London’s customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. It is a rare and precious gem of a book from one of Australia’s finest novelists.
“London’s prose is a seamlessly shifting blend of poetry, pathos and humor” – Washington Post
Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships, which won the Age Book of the Year in 1986, and Letter to Constantine, which won the Steele Rudd Award in 1994 and the West Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction. These stories have been published in one volume as The New Dark Age.
Her first novel, Gilgamesh, was published in 2001, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Good Parents, was published in April 2008 and won the 2009 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary awards.
London’s books have all been published internationally to critical acclaim. The Golden Age (2014) is her third novel, and is published by Random House Books Australia and is available from Bookworld or all leading book sellers.
Image: The Golden Age bookcover