TORONTO – Anita Rau Badami poured herself into her latest novel: her worries, her passions, even her love of gardening, passed on through generations.
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TORONTO – Anita Rau Badami poured herself into her latest novel: her worries, her passions, even her love of gardening, passed on through generations.
TORONTO – Anita Rau Badami poured herself into her latest novel: her worries, her passions, even her love of gardening, passed on through generations.
Badami’s first book in 15 years, “Asha in Her Garden” teems with aspects of the celebrated author’s life, reshaped into fiction.
As in her previous books, Badami started with a character. In this case, it was Asha, an ambitious matriarch who has taken charge of her life in response to a childhood in which she had no control.
But more than a character, the writing process began with a conundrum.
“And it also started with a problem that I had at that point in my life, and which probably explains why it took so long to write this book,” Badami explained, seated at a table in her publisher’s downtown Toronto office.
“I felt that I had lost my landscape, my sense of place, and just all of a sudden I didn’t know where I was writing out of.”
Badami burst onto the Canadian literary scene in 1996 with her best-selling debut novel “Tamarind Mem.” Her follow-up, “The Hero’s Walk,” came out in 2000 and won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Years later, it was picked as a finalist for “Canada Reads” on CBC.
