A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam

With George Bush currently criticising Pakistan over its efforts in the war on terror, we should remember the summer of 1971. The country then sat "in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns". Nixon, the last truly notorious Republican president before Bush, supported West Pakistan's fight against its annexed eastern wing. Consequently, he aided and abetted genocide. And yet, after nine months of conflict and human rights abuse, the free state of Bangladesh was born. It's that tumultuous period which Tahmima Anam mines to great effect in her striking debut novel, A Golden Age.

Rehana Haque, Anam's plucky protagonist, is in her late thirties, widowed and running two houses in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. She is also struggling to bring up her headstrong children, Sohail and Maya. Preoccupied with neighbourhood events, she is oblivious to the political hurricane howling through the country. Her days are spent dishing up the dal, tending her jasmine garden and trading hands with the "gin rummy ladies" at the Gymkhana Club. However, when the democratically elected Sheikh Mujib is refused his rightful place as prime minister, civil war is inevitable. With its arrival, Sohail, Maya and eventually Rehana, are reluctantly transformed into amateur guerrillas.

Rehana is a winning creation. Rather than letting her slide into a cliché of idealised motherhood, Anam laces her with devilish stubbornness and a nifty line in larceny. War provides a platform for her covert skills, although we learn that "in this, as in all other things, Rehana veered between indulgence and censure."

Tension is effectively developed as routines stall and adapt to the tune of military occupation. "In some quarters of the city, life was going on as before," observes Rehana. "Women were arguing for samosas. People were taking briefcases to work and frowning over their typewriters." Just not in the Haque household, where saris are being reworked into blankets for refugees and boxes of rifles lie buried under the hibiscus. A snatch of Urdu in the market is like a warning shot across Rehana's bow while a bit of Bengali banter provides a balm to her fear. What remains more uncertain than which side will prevail is the ultimate cost of victory.

Anam has created for Bangladesh what Romesh Gunesekera managed for Sri Lanka: a ballad to perseverance. In his debut novel, Reef (1994), Gunesekera chose lush imagery and elusive characters as the juxtaposition to his country's trauma. Tahmima Anam, by comparison, plays it stylistically straight in her descriptions of a paradise teetering on the brink of destruction. This is a slow-burning masala-saga of domestic life and familial loyalties struggling under fire.

The book opens with a prescient quote from the Bengali poet Shamsur Rahman: "Freedom, you are an arbour in the garden, the koel's song, glistening leaves on banyan trees, my notebook of poetry, to scribble as I please." A Golden Age pays tribute, with sensitivity and restrained passion, to those who fought for one such arbour: a country to call home.

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