The Golden Age
A Novel
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year: During WWII, a Jewish boy copes with a new homeland, a polio diagnosis—and falling in love for the first time.
Frank Gold’s family, Hungarian Jews, have fled the perils of World War II for the safety of Australia, but not long after their arrival, thirteen-year-old 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.
Soon, Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one another’s rehabilitation, facing the perils of illness and adolescence hand in hand—and scandalizing the prudish staff of the Golden Age. Their parents, meanwhile, are coping with their own challenges. Elsa’s mother must reconcile her hopes and dreams with the reality of her daughter’s sickness. Frank’s parents are isolated newcomers in a country they do not love and that does not seem to love them back. Frank’s mother, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home. But her husband slowly begins to free himself from the past and integrate into a new society.
A winner of multiple literary awards in Australia, The Golden Age is a deeply moving novel about hardship and resilience that “graciously captures young love in a quiet and beautifully sculpted story that is easily devoured in one sitting” (Library Journal).
“Poetic intensity suffuses the novel . . . Resisting easy sentimentality, [it] presents polio rehabilitation as a metaphor for postwar recovery.” —The New Yorker
“Beautiful.” —The Dallas Morning News
“The Golden Age is pretty much perfect.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seen one way, Frank Gold is unfortunate: he and his parents are from Hungary but are now "New Australians," victims of World War II refugees, displaced people, survivors that Australia prides itself on having taken in. Nearly 13, he is a polio victim relearning how to walk; he's seen a friend die in an iron lung. But Frank sees himself as a poet, one of the lucky few with a vocation, and as a lover. Having seen Elsa Briggs, another patient at the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Home, he knows that everything that has happened has lead him to her. London (The Good Parents) doesn't limit herself to Frank and Elsa: although short, the book feels ample, telling not just Frank's story but those of his parents, anxious pianist Ida and handsome Meyer, trying to adjust to Australia and cope with their wartime experiences; Elsa and her worried mother; and Sister Olive Penny, the Golden Age's generous and efficient head nurse. They all get time to shine in this limpid book about health and death, love and poetry, sex and hope, war and its aftermath. Like Sister Penny, London sees past people's exteriors to their complex and desirous interiors, and she generously offers those people to us in all their fullness. The novel was a recipient of multiple awards in London's native Australia, and deservedly so: it is pretty much perfect.
