Mother love is a cruelly consuming and occasionally unrequited affair. Children scream into this world demanding utter devotion from their mothers, then start running in the other direction soon after.

In her debut novel, "A Golden Age," Tahmima Anam sets a meditation on the lopsided nature of this bond inside the cyclone of events that led to the formation of Anam's native Bangladesh in 1971. Ostensibly a fictional account of one family's intergenerational revolutionary activities, "A Golden Age" is truly an illumination on how far a woman will go to protect her children's bodies and souls.

The story begins with young widow Rehana Haque losing custody of her children to her husband's sister, who spirits them away from Bangladesh (in its pre-revolutionary incarnation as East Pakistan) across India to Pakistan proper. Through unsavory means that will be revealed later, Rehana gets enough money to turn the property next door into a lucrative rental home and litigate for the return of her son and daughter. After her children are returned to her, Rehana's love for them and fear of being separated again become her only reality. Her life is entirely spent in preparing food, keeping house and ensuring the rental income that clothes and educates her cherished offspring. Rehana prepares elaborate meals, silently studies her children's social interactions, and yearly celebrates the anniversary of the day they came home.

The war comes just as Rehana's children are reaching adulthood and, to their fearful mother's dismay, both sensitive son Sohail and headstrong daughter Maya join the student movement pushing for independence. Rehana is something of a foreigner in her children's homeland: She moved to East Pakistan to marry and is fluent in the Urdu tongue of the brutal Pakistani soldiers. But Rehana supports her children to the point of implicating herself; when Sohail becomes a soldier, Rehana agrees to hide arms and personnel on the now-abandoned rental property. The conflict eventually takes both children away from home and Rehana finds herself caring for -- and falling for -- Sohail's injured superior officer, whom she is hiding.

Although "A Golden Age" purports to be the first novel written in English about the Bangladesh war of independence, the sequence of revolutionary events is pretty much the usual 20th-century civil war play-by-play: An oppressed majority stands up for its rights and a bloody crackdown ensues; a civil war eventually extricates the occupying forces, but not before the triumphant nationalists have done bloody things that darken their victory. While an undercurrent of the subcontinent's ethno-religious tension runs through Anam's story, "A Golden Age" is more meditation on the kind of death that results from giving birth than primer on Bangladesh history. When events conspire to force Rehana to make a Sophie's Choice-like, split-second decision between her own happiness and her child, Anam makes us feel the weight of Rehana's love for her children like a crushing anvil on the chest.

War is hell and all, and even a "just war" can devastate families and stir brutality. But with "A Golden Age," Anam reminds us most forcefully that a mother's love for her child is the most powerful and frightening weapon there is.

Cherie Parker is a freelance journalist and entertainment writer in Washington, D.C.