The Golden Age

Fearless, graceful and deeply benevolent

Helen Garner

London is my favourite Australian writer; her prose is matchless in its precision, beauty and clear-eyed compassion

Charlotte Wood

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

London’s novels seem to float, unsupported . . . The Golden Age is nevertheless a book that carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become

Tegan Bennett Daylight, Sydney Review of Books

Joan London is a superlative writer. The Golden Age, her latest novel, is set in Perth during the polio epidemic. It’s pitch perfect and word perfect. And in writing about children and illness London pays young people the respect of giving them total composure and self-hood

Sophie Cunningham, Australian

[London] has already proven in novels such as Gilgamesh and The Good Parents to be our finest living writer of marriage and family life. The Golden Age burnishes these credentials: it is her most accomplished and keenly felt work to date. Every other book I read this year will seem loud and blatant beside it

Geordie Williamson, Australian

Everything [Joan London] writes is pitch perfect and so richly yet modestly insightful that it illuminates the everyday for the reader long after each book has been finished and laid reluctantly aside

Adelaide Advertiser

London is not prolific (this is her third novel) but what she does produce is exquisite

Susan Johnson, Courier-Mail