Birth of a Nation
A Golden Age, Tahmima Anam, 2007
A first novel recreates the nine months in 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh from the old British created East Pakistan. see Partition of India. The author was born in 1973 in Dhaka and earned a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard.
House in old Dhaka 
The main character is a Calcutta born widow with two Dhaka university student children. Both children become involved in the resistance, the son as a saboteur, the daughter as a writer and documenter of Pakistani abuses. 12 years earlier when her husband died suddenly of a heart attack, the young widow was left without any means of support. Her late husband’s brother and his barren wife got a court order giving them custody of the young children who they moved to Lahore in West Pakistan.
The widow mysteriously comes into some money which she uses to build a large house for renting on her plot of land and to bribe a judge to regain custody of her children. The rent from a Hindu couple allows her to support her family and send the children to school.
Bangladesh is Born 
When the Pakistani army moves to occupy Dhaka, the Hindu couple return to the supposedly safer remote village of their origins and the widow allows the big empty house to be used by the resistance fighters to hide arms and people. An engrossing tale.
For a good look at life in rural East Pakistan during the 1971 genocide see the movie The Clay Bird about a young boy sent by his fundamentalist Muslim father to the local madrasa. The father remains in denial of the Pakistani genocide until it is too late.