Anita Rau Badami has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 23 ratings. The most-rated is The Hero's Walk.
The Hero's Walk
Summary
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."
©2000 Anita Rau Badami (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Summary
Longlist 2008 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Anita Rau Badami's acclaimed novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? chronicles the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy, over a span of 50 years, sweeping from the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985. Alive with Badami's warmth and humanity, and brimming with the daily sights and sounds of both Canada and India, this novel brilliantly conveys the tumultuous effects of the past on new immigrants, and the ways in which memory and myth, the personal and the political, become heartrendingly connected.
©2007 Anita Rau Badami (P)2020 Vintage Canada
Tamarind Mem
Summary
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 traveling 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.
©2002 Anita Rau Badami (P)2018 Vintage Canada
Tell It to the Trees
Summary
One freezing winter morning a dead body is found in the backyard of the Dharma family’s house. It’s the body of Anu Krishnan. For Anu, a writer seeking a secluded retreat from the city, the Dharmas’ “back-house” in the sleepy mountain town of Merrit’s Point was the ideal spot to take a year off and begin writing. She had found the Dharmas’ rental through a happy coincidence. A friend from university who had kept tabs on everyone in their graduating year - including the quiet and reserved Vikram Dharma and his first wife, Helen - sent her the listing. Anu vaguely remembered Vikram but had a strong recollection of Helen, a beautiful, vivacious, social, and charming woman. But now Vikram had a new wife, a marriage hastily arranged in India after Helen was killed in a car accident. Suman Dharma, a stark contrast to Helen, is quiet and timid. She arrived from the bustling warmth of India full of the promise of her new life - a new home, a new country, and a daughter from Vikram’s first marriage. But her husband’s suspicious, controlling, and angry tirades become almost a daily ritual, resigning Suman to a desolate future entangled in a marriage of fear and despair. Suman is isolated both by the landscape and the culture, and her fortunes begin to change only when Anu arrives. A friendship begins to form between the two women as Anu becomes a frequent visitor to the house. While the children, Varsha and Hemant, are at school, Anu, Vikram’s mother, Akka, and Suman spend time sharing tea and stories. But Anu’s arrival will change the balance of the Dharma household. Young Varsha, deeply affected by her mother’s death and desperate to keep her new family together, becomes increasingly suspicious of Anu’s relationship with her stepmother. Varsha’s singular attention to keeping her family together, and the secrets that emerge as Anu and Suman become friends, create cracks in the Dharma family that can only spell certain disaster.
©2012 Anita Rau Badami (P)2019 Vintage Canada