There, a shared Bengali culture linked Hindus and Muslims, with close ties between the Indian city of Calcutta and East Pakistan’s capital of Dhaka. The country that now bears this name was the politically and militarily dominant west the more densely populated east was a very different place. When the British quit India in 1947, they cut the subcontinent in two and left a Pakistan that was itself divided. Born in 1975, educated in France, Thailand, England and America and now resident in London, Anam is too young to have witnessed her country’s drive for independence instead, she’s telling the story of her parents’ generation.

I say “from that moment on” because this book, the first in a projected trilogy, gets off to a muddy start. It’s almost as if Anam were giving herself a test if she were writing about Los Angeles, she’d do the Santa Ana winds a test she passes, not least because she never uses the word “monsoon.” And from that moment on, almost everything goes right with this historical novel about the birth of a new nation. The description allows for a few seconds of calm in an increasingly tense plot, but it’s also a bravura set piece. The mornings seem “unbearably liquid” with humidity, and tempers worsen as “the air stopped around people’s throats, not a stir, everything still as buildings.” Then come the daily “exclamations of lightning,” and always there is “one small boy, or a very old man, or even a dog” waiting with his tongue out for the first drop of rain to fall. About halfway through Tahmima Anam’s first novel, the story slows for a weather report, an evocation of August in the author’s native Bangladesh.

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam