Asha in Her Garden Hardcover by Anita Rau Badami

Product Details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada (2026-08-11)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 304 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780735274341
• Item Weight: 379.89 grams
• Dimensions: 21.69 x 14.48 x 2.64 cm

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.

About the Author

ANITA RAU BADAMI’s first novel was the bestseller Tamarind Mem. Her bestselling second novel, The Hero’s Walk, won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and Italy’s Premio Berto, was named a Washington Post Best Book, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. Her third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? was released in 2006 to great acclaim, longlisted for the IMPAC Award, and a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her fourth novel, Tell It to the Trees, was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career, Badami is also a visual artist. She lives in Montreal.