A Golden Age

Dhaka, 1971. Rehana Haque is a widow trying to hold her family together as Bangladesh fights its war of independence from Pakistan — a war in which the Pakistani military committed systematic atrocities against the Bengali population, including mass rape as a weapon of war. Anam writes from inside the domestic experience of that war — a mother hiding liberation fighters in her garden, her children making choices she can't control, the specific texture of Dhaka under occupation. The most important Bangladesh novel in English and the one that puts human faces on one of the 20th century's least-known genocides.