Anita Rau Badami Libri

After the release of Anita Rau Badami's critically acclaimed first novel, Tamarind Women , it was evident a promising new talent had joined the Canadian literary community. Her dazzling literary follow-up is The Hero's Walk , a novel teeming with the author's trademark tumble of the haphazard beauty, wreckage and folly of ordinary lives. Set in the dusty seaside town of Toturpuram on the Bay of Bengal, The Hero's Walk traces the terrain of family and forgiveness through the lives of an exuberant cast of characters bewildered by the rapid pace of change in today's India. Each member of the Rao family pits his or her chance at personal fulfillment against the conventions of a crumbling caste and class system. Anita Rau Badami explains that " The Hero's Walk is a novel about so many things: loss, disappointment, choices and the importance of coming to terms with yourself and the circumstances of your life without losing the dignity embedded in all of us. At one level it is about heroism - not the hero of the classic epic, those enormous god-sized heroes - but my fascination with the day-to-day heroes and the heroism that's needed to survive all the unexpected disasters and pitfalls of life."

While living in Calgary and feeling homesick, Kamini recalls her childhood in India and her relationship with her mother, Saroja.

If it is true that happy families are all alike, the Dharma family seems no exception. At least until the winter morning when a lifeless body is found in their yard. The corpse of Anu Krishnan, the writer who rented the back cottage. Anu had been enchanted by that remote corner of Canada among the forests, and by that family that preserved the traditions of native India, from Suman's spicy cooking, married to the authoritarian Vikram, to the stories of grandmother Akka, which the children listened to with rapt attention. Yet, perhaps it was Anu's presence in that seemingly idyllic picture that had rippled the surface of things, bringing half-secrets and half-truths to the surface. A sort of ineffable tension that even the children seemed to sense. But now it is too late for Anu to investigate. In fact, now that her corpse lies in the snow, it is precisely the moment when the tension reaches its peak, and secrets and truths press to come to light. Each member of the Dharma family will tell their version of the story. To cover for each other? Or to reveal how things really are? Was Anu's death truly just an accident, as Vikram claims? The only thing certain is that in some families there are secrets better left unspoken. Or perhaps, as they say in fairy tales, secrets better told to the trees.