The Hero S Walk

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."

A beautiful and brilliant portrait of two generations of women. Set in India’s railway colonies, this is the story of Kamini and her mother Saroja, nicknamed Tamarind Mem due to her sour tongue. While in Canada beginning her graduate studies, Kamini receives a postcard from her mother saying she has sold their home and is travelling through India. Both are forced into the past to confront their dreams and losses and to explore the love that binds mothers and daughters everywhere.

Sripathi Rao, the protagonist of Anita Rau Badami's second novel, is an ordinary, middle-aged man whose career and family have failed to meet his expectations. But when his daughter and her husband are suddenly killed in a car crash, his world and his priorities turn upside down. Set in a small town in the Bay of Bengal during a time of cultural change, The Hero's Walk is a lyrical, affecting story about the complexity of family ties. The Hero's Walk won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, Caribbean and Canada.

The acclaimed author of Italian Ways returns with an exploration into Italy’s past and present—following in the footsteps of Garibaldi’s famed 250-mile journey across the Apennines. In the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy’s legendary revolutionary, was finally forced to abandon his defense of Rome. He and his men had held the besieged city for four long months, but now it was clear that only surrender would prevent slaughter and destruction at the hands of a huge French army. Against all odds, Garibaldi was determined to turn defeat into moral victory. On the evening of July 2, riding alongside his pregnant wife, Anita, he led 4,000 hastily assembled men to continue the struggle for national independence elsewhere. Hounded by both French and Austrian armies, the garibaldini marched hundreds of miles across the Appenines, Italy’s mountainous spine, and after two months of skirmishes and adventures arrived in Ravenna with just 250 survivors. Best-selling author Tim Parks, together with his partner Eleonora, set out in the blazing summer of 2019 to follow Garibaldi and Anita’s arduous journey through the heart of Italy. In The Hero’s Way he delivers a superb travelogue that captures Garibaldi’s determination, creativity, reckless courage, and profound belief. And he provides a fascinating portrait of Italy then and now, filled with unforgettable observations of Italian life and landscape, politics, and people.

In a small, dusty town in India, Sripathi Rao struggles as a copywriter to keep his family afloat in their crumbling ancestral home. But his mother berates him for not becoming a lawyer, his son prefers social protest to work, his unmarried sister seethes with repressed desire, and his wife, though subservient, blames him for refusing to communicate with their daughter Maya, who defied tradition, rejecting her proper Brahmin fiance for a Caucasian husband. Then a phone call brings tragedy: Maya and her husband have been killed in an accident leaving Sripathi to be their daughter's guardian. Sripathi reluctantly travels to Vancouver to bring the child back to India. Nandana has not spoken a word since her parents' death. Terrified, she resists her distant grandfather. Filled with guilt about his daughter but unable to express his feelings, Sripathi finds everything in his life falling apart. But with Nandana's arrival, his world slowly, unexpectedly, finds new hope. "The Hero's Walk" is a remarkably intimate novel that fills the senses with the unique textures of India. With humor and keen insight, Anita Rau Badami draws us into her story of the graceful heroism of the ordinary.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Leipzig (Institute for Anglistics), course: Seminar: Novels of the Indian Diaspora, 4 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: [...] This paper will firstly take a closer look at certain plot patterns and will then investigate how these patterns can be applied to the novel. Afterwards, we will deal with different concepts of characters – how they can be categorised and analysed and we will then try to describe some of the female protagonists of The Hero ́s Walk.

Anu Krishnan, seeking refuge from city life, becomes a tenant of the seemingly happy, tightly-knit Dharma family in a small northern town in B.C. But the Dharma family holds secrets which begin to spill out, brought on by Anu's presence, and leading to tragic consequences.!

"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."