Joan London

This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life. From one of Australia's most loved novelists. He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home. Perth, 1954. Thirteen-year-old Frank, survivor of Nazi-occupied Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio. In hospital, he befriends Sullivan, a poet, who inspires Frank with his love of words and how they can change a life. When Frank is moved to The Golden Age, the polio convalescent home, he enters a little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs: love and desire, death and poetry. Where children must learn that they're alone, even within their families. Then one day Frank sees twelve-year-old Elsa in the Girls' ward, and they quickly form a forbidden, passionate bonda Written in Joan London's customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past, and a yearning for deep connection. It is a rare and precious gem of a book from one of Australia's finest novelists. 'London's prose is a seamlessly shifting blend of poetry, pathos and humor' Washington Post

Golden Age, The

Gilgamesh is the epic story of a mother's search for the father of her child - from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia - all under the shadow of an imminent, and soon to be very real, World War II.

Gilgamesh

Golden Age

From the author of 'Gilgamesh' comes 'The Good Parents', a tale of loss and longing that gets right to the heart of the struggle to belong.

The Good Parents

Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold’s family escaped from Hungary and the perils of WW2 to the safety of Australia, but not long after their arrival Frank is diagnosed with polio. Sent to a sprawling children’s hospital called The Golden Age, he finds Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, and a vocation for poetry. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fuelling one another’s rehabilitation and facing the perils of polio and adolescence hand in hand. Meanwhile Frank and Elsa’s parents must cope with their changing realities. Margaret, who has sacrificed everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughter’s illness. Frank’s parents are isolated newcomers in a country they don’t love. Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home, while her husband Meyer slowly begins to free himself from the past and find his place in the Perth of the early 1950s. From the closed wards of The Golden Age narratives spin out, overlaid and assembled so to link disparate characters, milieus, generations and their respective fates. A moving story about transition between illness and recovery, childhood and maturity, life and death. “A universal meditation on nostalgia and hope, belonging and exile, love and loss, old world and new.” — The Australian “The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the divinity of the connections between them.” — The Sidney Morning Herald “The Golden Age is London’s most accomplished and keenly felt work to date... Her affection for her characters may be contagious.” — The Australian “The Golden Age carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become.” — Sydney Review of Books

The Golden Age

From the author of Gilgamesh - longlisted for the Orange Prize - comes a novel of loss and longing that goes right to the heart of the struggle to belong. Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl, moves away from home to live in the city. Here she begins an affair with her boss, whose wife is dying of cancer. But when Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is. As Toni and Jacob search for their daughter in the city, everything in their lives is thrown in doubt. They recall the dreams and ideals, the betrayals and choices of their youth - choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences. As if, to bring Maya back, they must return to their own pasts.

"Born under a cloud, Jack London in his early twenties was tramp, sailor, follower of Kelly's Industrial Army, oyster pirate, member of the coast patrol, gold-seeker in Alaska, socialist agitator. This was a prelude to a career as one of the greatest writer's of his time. But for all his adventures, London was far more than a romantic vagabond. His turbulent spirit was in constant inner conflict between the positive realist in him, the quality that led him to write pot-boilers, and the streak of pure idealism, which led him to seek a better world for all mankind. Merely as a story of action and adventure, this book makes magnificent reading. As a study of a strange and totured personality, written with amazing detachment and deep understanding, this biography is one of the really important books of the year. For it is not only that very rare achievement, a biography which gives the reader an intimate understanding of the mind and character of a man of genius, it is also a clear picture of the times which were the crucible of his career."--Book jacket, 1939 ed.

An Unconventional Biography

Jack London and His Times

From the award-winning author of the internationally-acclaimed novel Gilgamesh. A young singer runs into the desert of gold rush Kalgoorlie; Chagall comes to Paris in the 1920s; a hippie couple survey their ideals as Whitlam is deposed; a middle-aged man looks at his life after cancer on the eve of the millennium . . . Fourteen luminous stories from Joan London’s award-winning collections, Sister Ships and Letter to Constantine, together with two later stories, span the twentieth century in a volume that is storytelling at its very best.

Joan London

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