The Golden Age by Joan London

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, particularly front cover right tail now reinforced with book tape. Previous owner has stamped inside page.

This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life. From one of Australia's most loved novelists.

He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here.

All of them, like him, were stranded, wanting to go home. It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, a refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia.

At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families.

Written in Joan London's customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. It is a rare and precious gem of a book from one of Australia's finest novelists. (back cover)