Joan London is a bookseller and author living in Perth. She is the award-winning author of two short story collections and three novels, including Gilgamesh (Atlantic, 2004) and The Good Parents (Atlantic, 2010).
Praise for The Golden Age
"The Golden Age is pretty much perfect."
-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Her writing is cleareyed, generous-hearted, never
sentimental...every character, however minor, comes to life in
these pages. Like her fictional pianist, London is a virtuoso."
-Krikus Reviews (Starred)
"Poetic intensity suffuses the novel...resisting easy
sentimentality, [it] presents polio rehabilitation as a metaphor
for postwar recovery."
-The New Yorker
"Characterization is the novel's primary achievement. Readers will
feel affection for Frank and the many secondary characters."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The Golden Age is a beautiful love story that insists upon
celebrating the transcendent power of poetry and art over the
destructive forces of fear, despair and xenophobia."
-The Dallas Morning News
"For all its focus on exile and displacement, 'The Golden Age' is
by no means an angry book. It is a quiet, elegiac story of love and
renewal and liberation written in crisp prose..."
-Forward
"The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the
divinity of the connections between them."
-Helen Elliott, The Syndney Morning Herald
"The Golden Age is London's most accomplished and keenly felt work
to date...her affection for her characters may be contagious."
-Geordie Williamson, The Australian
"Fearless, graceful and deeply benevolent."
-Helen Garner, novelist
"The multi-award-winning London graciously captures young love in a
quiet and beautifully sculpted story that is easily devoured in one
sitting."
-Library Journal
"A brilliant display of life and change: the transition between war
and peace, between love and permission, between terrible paralysis
of various kinds and movement."
-Brenda Walker, The Monthly
"The Golden Age carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it
will most certainly become. "
-Tegan Bennett Daylight, Sydney Review of Books
"London's writing is at its best when bringing to life the
coming-of-age story between Frank and Elsa: their hopes and fears
(and those of other polio-stricken children), their resolve, and
their disappointments. The setting and place are rich and detailed,
and Perth feels alive."
-Historical Novel Society
Praise for Joan London
"[Gilgamesh] captures the romance of wanderlust like no other novel
I have read."
-Maureen Freely, The Guardian
"[The Good Parents] a dark and lovely work is both a novel of ideas
and one of emotions...the mystery of enthrallment only deepens,
irradiated by London's gorgeous prose."
-Roxana Robinson, The New York Times
"London's prose is a seamlessly shifting blend of poetry, pathos,
and humor."
-The Washington Post
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