A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam

"The rasping feeling of loss" percolates the pages of this powerful debut novel. Tahmima Anam traces a "country splitting", in the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, through the breaking heart of a widow. Rehana Haque loses custody of her two children, Maya and Sohail, to the care of her brother-in-law in Karachi on the grounds of "her grief, her poverty, her youth". As she struggles for the hearts of her children, so a nation struggles to be custodian of its own fate.

When war breaks out, rumour has it that all the animals in Mirpur Zoo die of fright. But Anam's concern is with human beings finding ways to live in the landscape of war in spite of the "cold fear" at their backs, as "twisted politics" intrudes upon the intimately personal at every turn.

The insidious power of the novel is in a sense of foreboding imbued in both human beings and inanimate objects, which endows the storytelling with a rhythmic, assured force - the chronicle of deaths foretold. Huts tilt towards the water, "as though aware of their fate"; for every monsoon, the rivers steal vast chunks of the land, and yet every year "hopeful little shacks" are rebuilt.

Likewise, Rehana knows the flimsiness of human relationships, as an aristocratic woman whose father lost his fortune through bad luck, and whose cautious husband ended up dead because "accident doesn't discriminate". Yet the will-power to live ignites a mood of hope in the midst of despair, freedom in entrapment.

This is a novel about how one copes with pain. Rehana carries her grief with grace, not allowing her children to see her cry. Rather than disintegrating, Rehana creates; she builds a house whose back faces the sun and calls it "Shona", gold, representing everything most precious to her, and the price she must pay to preserve it. Anam tests the limits of altruism and selfishness as her characters must decide what they most love in the world, with Rehana's first prayers always to protect her children. The title also alludes to the novel's poignant nostalgia; characters yearn for a golden age of their lives, when their faces were "unmarked by grief or history".

A Golden Age copes with "bone-breaking grief" via stylistic grace; it does not buckle beneath the weight of its material, but with tight narrative vertebrae moves through the months of a single year in prose of a beautiful sparsity, as if it knows time is precious and it must choose what to salvage from the flotsam and jetsam of history. Anam achieves a delicacy and tenderness in conjuring the "threads of feeling" between people, a poetic precision of images: kites floating, huts sinking into the sea, "hungry, cracked earth". From the wreckage and destruction grows a voice of real eloquence.