The Golden Age

Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction, the Kibble Literary Award, the Western Australian Premier's Award for fiction and the Queensland Literary Award for fiction.

It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Home 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. It is a place where children must learn they're alone, even within their families.

Subtle, moving and remarkably lovely, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection, from one of Australia's finest and most-loved novelists.

'Perfect' PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

'Brilliant' THE MONTHLY

'Graceful' HELEN GARNER

'Generous-hearted' KIRKUS REVIEWS

'Rich' HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY

'Elegiac' FORWARD

'Transcendent' THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS