A Globe and Mail Best New Book of Summer 2026 • One of CIBA's Essential Summer Reads • Included in The Quill & Quire's 2026 Fall Fiction Preview
Bestselling, award-winning, Canada-Reads finalist (for The Hero's Walk) Anita Rau Badami showcases her extraordinary storytelling gifts in this entertaining tale set in India and Montreal—her much-anticipated first novel in fifteen years.
Asha Mohan's backyard garden in Montréal, shaded by a cherished maple tree, has been her sanctuary since she and her husband moved to Canada from India decades ago. It is here that Asha finds refuge from the trials of her now-grown children, and exchanges gossip and advice over a shared hedge with Madame Brard, her formidable neighbour who took Asha under her wing long ago. The magnificent tree also marks the spot where—twenty years ago, on the evening of her 50th birthday—Asha was knocked unconscious by an unsavoury drug-dealing acquaintance of her wayward son.
Now, as Asha turns 70, the maple tree has reached its end and must be cut down. In its shadow, Asha finds herself remembering the attack of twenty years back and haunted by an earlier, shocking tragedy in India, one that caused her to flee the country of her birth. As Asha re-examines herself, her reconfigured garden, and her relations with friends, enemies, and loved ones (‘two children from the same body – mine – and each a complete stranger’), she unearths new clarity about who she is and what might be required of her now—a vision with the power to transform her life.
Anita Rau Badami delights us in this big-hearted, compulsively readable and relatable novel about mysteries, ambitions, misunderstandings and miracles that ricochet and echo through a close-knit family and the woman at its centre.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Bestselling, award-winning, Canada-Reads finalist (for The Hero's Walk) Anita Rau Badami showcases her extraordinary storytelling gifts in this entertaining tale set in India and Montreal—her much-anticipated first novel in fifteen years.
Asha Mohan's backyard garden in Montréal, shaded by a cherished maple tree, has been her sanctuary since she and her husband moved to Canada from India decades ago. It is here that Asha finds refuge from the trials of her now-grown children, and exchanges gossip and advice over a shared hedge with Madame Brard, her formidable neighbour who took Asha under her wing long ago. The magnificent tree also marks the spot where—twenty years ago, on the evening of her 50th birthday—Asha was knocked unconscious by an unsavoury drug-dealing acquaintance of her wayward son.
Now, as Asha turns 70, the maple tree has reached its end and must be cut down. In its shadow, Asha finds herself remembering the attack of twenty years back and haunted by an earlier, shocking tragedy in India, one that caused her to flee the country of her birth. As Asha re-examines herself, her reconfigured garden, and her relations with friends, enemies, and loved ones (‘two children from the same body – mine – and each a complete stranger’), she unearths new clarity about who she is and what might be required of her now—a vision with the power to transform her life.
Anita Rau Badami delights us in this big-hearted, compulsively readable and relatable novel about mysteries, ambitions, misunderstandings and miracles that ricochet and echo through a close-knit family and the woman at its centre.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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