Fiction January 1, 1

A Golden Age is meant as testimony. Using her family’s experiences as inspiration for her debut novel, Tahmima Anam tells the story of the Indian subcontinent’s other partition—the nine-month war that ended in 1971, separating West and East Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Anam, an expatriate Bangladeshi and an anthropologist by training, is a keen, sympathetic witness for her heroine, Rehana Haque, a widow living in a middle-class enclave of Dhaka.