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