Joan London’s The Golden Age is the rare novel that makes its reader want to cry at almost every single page, but manages to be uplifting at the same time. It’s about Frank, a young polio patient and budding poet in Western Australia who is also a survivor of World War II, and has arrived in the area as a refugee with his parents, urbane Hungarian Jews (the mother is a concert pianist) at something of a loss in their new home. The title of the novel is the real name of a convalescent center for children from the time; the love story between Frank and another patient, Elsa, animates the novel as it follows the children, staff and families through individual processes of adapting to new and devastating circumstances. The novel’s passages about both the war and the disease are spare but no less brutal for that, leaving the imagination to do the hard work of understanding just what the characters have endured. With the refugee crisis in Europe and the new resurgence of anti-Semitism thanks to Trump supporters, the novel feels too relevant, and reading it as a new mother made all its poignant passages feel even more meaningful to me. — Sarah Seltzer, Deputy Editor
