What keeps her going, what enables her to survive is her love for her children. A bungalow she owns is used to stash explosives and weapons and to hide an injured guerilla commander. What begins as low risk involvement steadily becomes more dangerous. Much merriment ensues when the sewing party meets on the roof of her home. Instead she opens up her trunks of saris, cutting them up to make bedding for the guerrillas and persuading her friends to do the same. She doesn’t protest, or march or read propaganda. The only way to keep her family intact is to support the cause they believe in so deeply. Gradually Rehana realises that she cannot keep her children away from the protests and the fighting. Another part of her wants them to have nothing to do with the conflict because, that way, they could be safe. Part of her wants to indulge her children’s passionate belief in the cause of freedom, allowing them to do anything that makes them happy. Rehana’s own attitude to the war - and particularly to her children’s involvement - is ambivalent.

Maya places her talents as a writer at the services of the rebels’ propaganda machinery. Sohail joins the guerrila resistance forces, taking part in risky sabotage and ambush campaigns. Both children are swept up in the fervour. As the campaign for Bangla’s freedom gathers momentum, that determination is put to the test. Though she managed to get them back, the experience has made her vow never to lose them again. She lost them once when a court declared her unfit to care for the children and sent them to live with her family back in East Pakistan. Rehana Haque, a young Urdu-speaking widow, is fiercely protective of her son Sohail and daughter Maya. This is not a novel about politics however it’s about one family’s experience of nationalist fervour that gives rise to a war and the eventual birth of a new nation. A little research revealed that it’s Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, apparently inspired by the experience of her politician grandfather and journalist father during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. I hadn’t heard of A Golden Age before it was chosen for The Big Jubilee Read: a list of books from across the Commonwealth selected to mark The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

A golden age by tahmima anam