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Europa Editions
August 2016
On Sale: August 16, 2016
Featuring: Frank Gold
224 pages
ISBN: 1609453328
EAN: 9781609453329
Kindle: B01BS7N7IU
Trade Size / e-Book
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Historical
Joan London, author of Gilgamesh, gives her readers an immensely satisfying and generous-hearted story about displacement, recovery, resilience, and love with The Golden Age. Thirteen-year-old Frank Goldβs family, Hungarian Jews, escape the perils of World War II to the safety of Australia in the 1940s. But not long after their arrival Frank is diagnosed with polio. He is sent to a sprawling childrenβs hospital called The Golden Age, where he meets Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, a girl who radiates pure light. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one anotherβs rehabilitation, facing the perils of polio and adolescence hand in hand, and scandalizing the prudish staff of The Golden Age. Meanwhile, Frank and Elsaβs parents must cope with their changing realities. Elsaβs mother Margaret, who has given up everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughterβs sickness. Frankβs parents, transplants to Australia from a war-torn Europe, are isolated newcomers in a country that they do not love and that does not seem to love them. Frankβs mother Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home. But her husband, Meyer, slowly begins to free himself from the past and integrate into a new society. With tenderness and humor, The Golden Age tells a deeply moving story about illness and recovery. It is a book about learning to navigate the unfamiliar, about embracing music, poetry, death, and, most importantly, life.
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