A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

A Golden Age
by Tahmima Anam
Harper (January 8, 2008)
288 pages
Fiction

Summary in a Sentence:

Rehana Haque, a young widow with two teenage children in East Pakistan in 1971, is forced to make some difficult choices when her happy life is disrupted by the outbreak of the Bangladesh war for independence.

My thoughts:

"Dear Husband, 

I lost our children today."

Meet Rehana Haque. A widowed mother of two in 1970s East Pakistan, Rehana would do anything for her children. Shortly after her husband's death, Rehana allowed her brother-in-law to take custody of her two children for a year, and she never lets herself forget it. She is a devoted mother, perhaps to a fault, and the unchanging love of a mother for her children is at the forefront of this novel about the war for Bangladesh's independence.

This novel starts out strong, but without a baseline knowledge of the Bangladesh War for Independence, the reader could easily feel a little lost. Also, I had a very hard time making a connection with Rehana's two children, Sohail and Maya. I found that I didn't really care what happened to the characters in the novel.

Luckily, the second half of the novel takes on a suspenseful edge as the war and the Haque family's involvement in the resistance increases. The last chapters are page turners indeed, and make this book one worth reading.

~ Read for the South Asian Author Challenge ~

You might also like:

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai 
• The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh 

Other Reviews:

Motherhood and Anarchy |  A Book Sanctuary | Trish's Reading Nook