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★ “The Golden Age is pretty much perfect.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Frank Gold’s Jewish Hungarian family have fled Europe and the looming threat of Nazi Germany for the safety of Australia. Not long after their arrival, however, thirteen-year-old Frank is diagnosed with polio and is sent to a sprawling children’s hospital called the Golden Age. There he meets Elsa, the most beautiful and radiant girl he has ever seen.
Frank and Elsa’s love fuels their rehabilitation, allows them to face the perils of their illness with humor and bravery, and scandalizes the prudish staff of the Golden Age. Meanwhile, their parents are coping with challenges of their own. Frank and his family are isolated newcomers in a country they do not love and that does not seem to love them. His mother, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to let the empty western deserts of Australia become her home. While Elsa’s mother must reconcile her big dreams with the new realities of her daughter’s sickness.
The Golden Age is a deeply moving, inspiring, and prize-winning novel about resilience, youth, and the will to live life to the fullest, whatever the odds.
WINNER OF THE PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARD AND THE PATRICK WHITE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD
“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 a beautiful love story that insists upon celebrating the transcendent power of poetry and art over the destructive forces of fear, despair and xenophobia.”—The Dallas Morning News
“For all its focus on exile and displacement, The Golden Age is by no means an angry book. It is a quiet, elegiac story of love and renewal and liberation written in crisp prose.”—Forward
“The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the divinity of the connections between them.”—Helen Elliott, The Sydney 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, author of The Children’s Bach
“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
“London’s writing is at its best when bringing to life the coming-of-age story between Frank and Elsa: their hopes and fears (and those of other polio-stricken children), their resolve, and their disappointments. The setting and place are rich and detailed, and Perth feels alive.”—Historical Novel Society