The Golden Age is a novel written by Award-winning Australian author Joan London. One of her notable works includes the award-winning Gilgamesh. The Golden Age was published in 2014 by Random House Australia Publishers. The Golden Age won the 2015 Prime Ministers Literary Award and the Patrick White Award. It also won the Kibble Literary Award, Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. It was also shortlisted for Miles Franklin Award and ALS Gold Medal Award. The Australian Book Industry Awards shortlisted The Golden Age for the Australian Literary Fiction Book of the year.
The novel is set in a polio outbreak in Perth, Australia in 1954. Frank Gold and Elsa are among other children with polio living at the Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Home. Frank is a refugee from Hungary learning to walk again. He loves to write poetry which further fuels his attraction to Elsa. They quickly form a formidable and passionate bond. Frank and Elsa create their world at the hospital where they get to experience everything from love, pain, loneliness, and death. The children must learn to live alone without their families which makes them grow into young adults and come to terms with adulthood early on. Frank and Elsa’s relationship quickly turns into a romantic getaway from their lonely and depressing lives at the Golden Age Home.
Critic Hele Garner called the novel fearless, deeply benevolent and graceful. Brenda Walker from “The Monthly” called the film a marvelous portrayal of life and change. Tegan Daylight from “Sydney Review of Books” wrote that the author’s novels seem to float and unsupported, but clarified that The Golden Age is an assured classic.
