All right, Bostonists: Tahmima Anam is reading tonight in Harvard Square. Show your face. Be fashionably late. But come for the ironically-named A Golden Age – one of the first Bangladesh war novels I’ve heard of, nominated for a Guardian book prize — and samosas afterwards in one of the many desi restaurants which litter the square.

The experiences of a woman drawn into the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence illuminate the conflict’s wider resonances in Anam’s impressive debut, the first installment in a proposed trilogy. Rehana Haque… is only dimly aware of the growing political unrest until Pakistani tanks arrive and the fighting begins. Suddenly, Rehana’s family is in peril and her children become involved in the rebellion…

Rehana… allows her son’s guerrilla comrades to bury guns in her backyard and… shelters a Bengali army major after he is wounded…. the mayhem of invasion… the rape and torture of Hindus and Bengali nationalists, and the stench and squalor of a refugee camp. [Link — thanks, Ennis]

Light reading, that, but necessary. The war is one of the least understood in the West: millions dead, and the U.S. backing the side of the killers. Bangla writers still trail Indians and Pakistanis in English markets. Most Pakistanis would be as excited about writing this war as Turks would about the Armenian genocide. And Muslim Bangladesh is embarrassed about India’s role.

Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1975. She attended Harvard University, where she earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology. [Link]

Related posts: The Kick, Nixon and the Bangladesh massacre