Anam’s story gains momentum as its characters take shape…Readers will feel the depth of this nation’s crisis through its people, and the conclusion delivers a surprising blow.

An illumination on how far a woman will go to protect her children’s bodies and souls . . . Anam reminds us most forcefully that a mother’s love for her child is the most powerful and frightening weapon there is.

Moving…Full of beauty…Both a riveting tale and a lament for the atrocities the people suffered during Pakistan’s invasion in 1971 …The novel just keeps getting stronger as it progresses…building to a doozy of an ending.

Compelling…Anam is cracking open secrets, personal and political, to let the healing begin.

[A] wonderful addition to the growing list of novels that seek, in some way, to help us understand the history and people of South Asia.

Tahmima Anam’s startlingly accomplished and gripping novel describes not only the tumult of a great historical event…but also the small but heroic struggles of individuals living in the shadow of revolution and war.

eventful, exotic, intelligent, and romantic

Written with marvelous control and understatement, this first novel impressed me with its maturity.

A glittering debut…Readers of Khaled Hosseini’s brutal but magnificent A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS will find similar pleasures in Anam’s book.

A GOLDEN AGE has everything an epic should have...[Anam] is able to convey the larger story of politics and war against a much smaller and more intimate story.

Readable and well crafted . . . Compelling . . . A generous act of creative empathy . . . Anam does not flinch from complexity and horror of a more intimate nature than the details of atrocities.

Told with great skill and urgency…Spellbinding in its sense of quiet foreboding…Anam has written a story about powerful events. But it is her descriptions of the small, unheralded moments, the ones slipping effortlessly between the interstices of major conflagrations, which truly touch the heart.

A vibrant first novel…A story that is both intimately close to the family and large enough to encompass a revolution.

In this striking debut novel . . . Anam deftly weaves the personal and the political, giving the terrors of war spare, powerful treatment while lyrically depicting the way in which the struggle for freedom allows Rehana to discover both her strength and her heart.

"Compelling…Anam is cracking open secrets, personal and political, to let the healing begin."