After the release of Anita Rau Badami's critically acclaimed first novel, Tamarind Mem, 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."

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WINNER 2001 - Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean)
WINNER 2000 - Marian Engel Award
NOMINEE 2000 - Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
NOMINEE 2001 - BC Book Prize's Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction

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"Engrossing…. Badami brilliantly brings to life a whole cast of [characters]…. The author masterfully captures the sights, smells and sounds of this lively world without overwhelming readers. A welcome, sly humor runs throughout…. This book demands to be read straight through…. "
—The Washington Post

"A skilled writer can convey epic events through the lives of ordinary people. Badami's The Hero's Walk, which deals with the transmutations of a millennia-old culture, is an outstanding example of such skill."
—The Commonwealth Writers Prize judges

"The Hero’s Walk is beautifully crafted- rich and lush, though sometimes anthropological, distracting, even. It offers bittersweet epiphanies amidst life’s tragedies and showcases a novelist on the move."
—Bill Richardson, The Georgia Straight

"The Hero’s Walk is a wonderfully textured tale whose poignant events are imbued with truthfulness. Its sly wit and penetrating insights illuminate a bittersweet story which brings its reluctant characters close to redemption. It is a chronicle that echoes what Graham Greene once called the random shrapnel of human experience."
—The London Free Press

"Sensitive, sensual and brilliantly imagined…a family story which will enrich and amuse you."
—The Telegram

"She has an amazing knack for hauling together the beauty, mess, joy and folly of ordinary people’s lives."
—The Hamilton Spectator

"The four-year wait for The Hero’s Walk was worth it. This is an unforgettable and heart- wrenching tale…."
—The Ottawa Citizen

"One of the may strengths of this novel is how the author reaches deep into her characters, shares their surface and more profound thoughts and emotions, and conveys them to the reader."
—The Telegram

"Vitriol, in all its ravishing, stomach-churning splendour, is the river upon which flows Anita Rau Badami’s second novel….."
—The Citizen

"What a treat it is to read Anita Rau Badami…. The Hero’s Walk is a novel of a traditional, nearly anachronistic, stroytelling-as-transport kind; an escape, an entertainment — that mere but elusive thing most of us, after all, are seeking in good fiction…. After gaining fame with Tamarind Mem, Anita Rau Badami doesn’t disappoint with her new novel."
—National Post

"[A] big-hearted and compulsively readable novel… that ends in a highly satisfying way…. [Badami is] a gifted observer of the human comedy."
—The Toronto Star

"Badami willfully spurns her cleverest perceptions in The Hero’s Walk"
—The Globe and Mail

"Her first novel was good, her second is marvellous…. Badami’s psychiological insight illuminates every scene [and] breathes authentic life into her characters…. Badami is a first-rate novelist. Read it."
—NOW

"Badami writes unflinchingly about a man both disappointed and disappointing. In her capable hands Rao is … entirely human, and vividly rendered…. This is Badami’s talent for storytelling: she imbues every sentence with compassion…. her easy way with narrative weaves a rich and textured history, and she holds its various strands just taut enough…. Badami exercises control, playing out the consequences a little at a time, and then a little more. Badami may have made her name with Tamarind Mem, but it is The Hero’s Walk that will carry that name."
—Quill & Quire (starred review)

"It runs only 350 pages but it is as satisfying as a story twice as long."
—The Gazette

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Anita Rau Badami's website

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Born in the eastern town of Rourkela, Badami spent her childhood drifting around India as her father, a mechanical engineer and train designer, was transferred frequently. Her family moved at least eight times before she was twenty. Since her parents both spoke different Indian dialects, English was the bridging language for the family. (Badami's second language is Hindi.) The convent nuns who took care of her schooling were not always a receptive audience for Badami's budding literary talents. "Dear child," one of her teachers commented in response to a writing assignment, "what big lies you tell. Please ask your mother to see me." At school the nuns taught Greek and Roman myths, and even Celtic tales. "The only mythology I don't remember learning in school was Hindu mythology," Anita recalls. At home, however, Badami was immersed in the cultures and myths of her family and the multilingual railway workers. This mélange of myths informed Badami's formidable storytelling ability and shaped the exploration of heroism that runs throughout her latest novel.

In 1991 Anita Rau Badami left Bangalore in southern India to join her husband in Calgary, where he went to pursue his Masters in Environmental Science and then to Vancouver for a PhD in Planning. Arriving with their four-year-old son and five hundred dollars, the family was soon ensconced in a depressing basement apartment. To earn money, the former journalist, ad copywriter and children's writer ended up selling china in a mall. Of this time, Badami says, "I learned an awful lot about figurines and place settings, but I also made the most wonderful friends."

Badami began taking creative writing courses and wound up with Tamarind Mem, her master's thesis project at the University of Calgary. She sent the manuscript to Penguin Canada and quickly found herself a bestselling author with a reputation as a talented new Canadian writer. Her stories of home and away, of here and there, made her a part of the tradition Badami refers to as the post-postcolonial-immigrant school that began with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. "I don't think I could have written a novel if I had not left India," Badami said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. "I find that the distance gives me perspective and passion. I was twenty-nine years in India and ten years here, so I have a foot in India and a couple of toes here. I am both doomed and blessed, to be suspended between two worlds, always looking back, but with two gorgeous places to inhabit, in my imagination or my heart."

Just after the publication of The Hero's Walk, Anita Rau Badami won the prestigious Marian Engel Award, given to a Canadian woman author in mid-career for outstanding prose writing. (Previous recipients include Carol Shields, Jane Urquhart, Bonnie Burnard and Barbara Gowdy.) Most recently, The Hero's Walk was optioned for film by a Canadian producer of See Spot Run Films in Los Angeles.

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