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Asha in Her Garden: A Novel
Bestselling, award-winning, Canada-Reads finalist (for The Hero’s Walk) Anita Rau Badami’s lauded storytelling gifts are on full display in this absorbing, entertaining, and deeply relatable novel about a close-knit family immigrating from India to Montreal. The author’s first book in fifteen years will delight Anita’s many fans while capturing a new generation of readers.
A big-hearted, compulsively readable novel about Asha Mohan, a woman who is given the opportunity to reconsider the narrative of her life while there is still time. Asha in Her Garden is a gorgeous paean to the complexities of family and friends, the unanticipated consequences of ambition, and the mysteries and miracles that reside in every person’s life.
Asha Mohan’s well-loved backyard garden in Montréal, shaded by a cherished old maple tree, has been witness to all the events in her life since she and husband and children moved to Canada from India decades ago. It is here, in her sanctuary, that Asha finds refuge from her complicated family, and exchanges gossip and advice over a shared hedge with Madame Brard, her formidable business-minded next-door neighbour, who took a newly arrived Asha under her wing long ago. It is also under the magnificent tree where – on the evening of her 50th birthday -- Asha was knocked unconscious by an unsavoury drug-dealing acquaintance of her wayward son.
Now the maple tree has reached the end of its life and must be cut down. In the shadow of its demise, Asha finds herself remembering the attack of twenty years back and haunted by an even earlier, shocking tragedy in India, when her marriage was still young, that led her to uproot her family and leave the country of her birth. As Asha re-examines herself and her reconfigured garden in relation to her friends, her loved ones (“two children from the same body – mine – and each a complete stranger”), and the state of the world, she unearths surprising new clarity about who she is and what might be required of her now – a vision that just may transform her life.
Anita Rau Badami’s storytelling gifts are on full display in this absorbing, entertaining, and deeply relatable novel about the mysteries, complexities, and miracles that ricochet through a close-knit immigrant family.
A big-hearted, compulsively readable novel about Asha Mohan, a woman who is given the opportunity to reconsider the narrative of her life while there is still time. Asha in Her Garden is a gorgeous paean to the complexities of family and friends, the unanticipated consequences of ambition, and the mysteries and miracles that reside in every person’s life.
Asha Mohan’s well-loved backyard garden in Montréal, shaded by a cherished old maple tree, has been witness to all the events in her life since she and husband and children moved to Canada from India decades ago. It is here, in her sanctuary, that Asha finds refuge from her complicated family, and exchanges gossip and advice over a shared hedge with Madame Brard, her formidable business-minded next-door neighbour, who took a newly arrived Asha under her wing long ago. It is also under the magnificent tree where – on the evening of her 50th birthday -- Asha was knocked unconscious by an unsavoury drug-dealing acquaintance of her wayward son.
Now the maple tree has reached the end of its life and must be cut down. In the shadow of its demise, Asha finds herself remembering the attack of twenty years back and haunted by an even earlier, shocking tragedy in India, when her marriage was still young, that led her to uproot her family and leave the country of her birth. As Asha re-examines herself and her reconfigured garden in relation to her friends, her loved ones (“two children from the same body – mine – and each a complete stranger”), and the state of the world, she unearths surprising new clarity about who she is and what might be required of her now – a vision that just may transform her life.
Anita Rau Badami’s storytelling gifts are on full display in this absorbing, entertaining, and deeply relatable novel about the mysteries, complexities, and miracles that ricochet through a close-knit immigrant family.
299 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2026
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August 21, 2026Written with exquisite, painterly detail, this book is composed of the reminiscences of the matriarch, Asha, now in her 70s and content, about the storms of her life. Her life is cleaved into two time periods, marked by tragedy --. This event had longstanding ripples on her and her family's life, not least of all as it triggered her determination to uproot her family to emigrate to Montreal. Asha is a complex character, she was quite bitter and unsatisfied, but one of the many talents of this novel is it really helps us to see how her bitterness was justified even as it was directed towards many fronts: her traumatized and aimless surviving son, her mellow husband, her competitive cousin. It's a beautiful family saga anchored by a tree in their house, witness to the family issues, that's now scheduled for removal, for more trees and vegetable gardens to come, in a good metaphor for the adaptability of life.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I’ve read all of Anita Rau Badami’s novels (Tamarind Mem, The Hero’s Walk, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Tell it to the Trees) and have enjoyed them all. Asha in Her Garden, the latest, after a 15-year hiatus, is no exception.
The novel begins with seventy-year-old Asha Mohan witnessing the cutting down of an old maple tree in her Montreal back yard. This tree shaded her beloved garden, her sanctuary since she and her husband Suresh bought the house after moving from India decades earlier. The tree’s removal serves as an impetus for Asha’s examining her life, all the way back to her childhood in Bangalore, its joys and sorrows, and her relationships with her family. She wonders if she can change those things she doesn’t like. Can she reconfigure her life just as the removal of the tree reconfigures her garden?
It is the character of Asha that is central to the book. She is a complex, authentic character. She is what would be termed “a force to be reckoned with.” From an early age, she decides “She would be loud and demanding, a force in a world where noisy and pushy and forceful equalled success.” And she is certainly successful in her career. Her son Dilip thinks of his mother as indomitable, noisy, and strong. Suresh fell in love with “her independent nature, her sharp mind, her strength and willingness to take chances.”
But we also see Asha’s flaws. She is a proud person who angers easily. Added to these is her inability to apologize. Suresh comments, “That was her problem. She could not bring herself to admit she was wrong.” As one would expect, these traits affect her relationships with her family, especially Suresh, Dilip, and her cousin Meru. Asha herself also comes to realize that her desire to be independent caused her to make some poor choices: “Now she resented everyone in her family because she had made the wrong choices – she knew it was unfair of her, but she could not stop being angry.” There is no doubt that she loves her family, but she is also often annoyed by them. All of this makes her relatable.
There are several themes. One is a lesson Asha is taught by her uncle: “’What you see . . . or hear . . . is usually not the true nature of a thing.’” She seems to learn this lesson, later commenting, “How you describe a thing depends on how you look at it, and there were as many ways of looking at a thing as there were leaves on a tree.”
What remains with me is the comments about life. Life is not easy. At times it can feel, like Asha’s garden, a ruined landscape, but at other times, “like her perennials which went down every year and then burgeoned back,” life brings joys. When faced with death, Asha decides, “Life was amazing. It was magic. It was this tiny seed of hope, converted into all manner of things.” Change is inevitable, but even when it seems undesirable it can be positive. For example, the cutting of the tree brings “a vast openness” full of potential. Life is all about “The keeping, the letting go. Breathing in and breathing out. You do these things to live when you have breath, and when your life is done, you let go.”
I enjoyed this novel. It’s beautifully written with many descriptions of flowers and trees which serve as metaphors for Asha’s life. And its comments about life are as relatable as is the character of the flawed but admirable Asha.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/).
The novel begins with seventy-year-old Asha Mohan witnessing the cutting down of an old maple tree in her Montreal back yard. This tree shaded her beloved garden, her sanctuary since she and her husband Suresh bought the house after moving from India decades earlier. The tree’s removal serves as an impetus for Asha’s examining her life, all the way back to her childhood in Bangalore, its joys and sorrows, and her relationships with her family. She wonders if she can change those things she doesn’t like. Can she reconfigure her life just as the removal of the tree reconfigures her garden?
It is the character of Asha that is central to the book. She is a complex, authentic character. She is what would be termed “a force to be reckoned with.” From an early age, she decides “She would be loud and demanding, a force in a world where noisy and pushy and forceful equalled success.” And she is certainly successful in her career. Her son Dilip thinks of his mother as indomitable, noisy, and strong. Suresh fell in love with “her independent nature, her sharp mind, her strength and willingness to take chances.”
But we also see Asha’s flaws. She is a proud person who angers easily. Added to these is her inability to apologize. Suresh comments, “That was her problem. She could not bring herself to admit she was wrong.” As one would expect, these traits affect her relationships with her family, especially Suresh, Dilip, and her cousin Meru. Asha herself also comes to realize that her desire to be independent caused her to make some poor choices: “Now she resented everyone in her family because she had made the wrong choices – she knew it was unfair of her, but she could not stop being angry.” There is no doubt that she loves her family, but she is also often annoyed by them. All of this makes her relatable.
There are several themes. One is a lesson Asha is taught by her uncle: “’What you see . . . or hear . . . is usually not the true nature of a thing.’” She seems to learn this lesson, later commenting, “How you describe a thing depends on how you look at it, and there were as many ways of looking at a thing as there were leaves on a tree.”
What remains with me is the comments about life. Life is not easy. At times it can feel, like Asha’s garden, a ruined landscape, but at other times, “like her perennials which went down every year and then burgeoned back,” life brings joys. When faced with death, Asha decides, “Life was amazing. It was magic. It was this tiny seed of hope, converted into all manner of things.” Change is inevitable, but even when it seems undesirable it can be positive. For example, the cutting of the tree brings “a vast openness” full of potential. Life is all about “The keeping, the letting go. Breathing in and breathing out. You do these things to live when you have breath, and when your life is done, you let go.”
I enjoyed this novel. It’s beautifully written with many descriptions of flowers and trees which serve as metaphors for Asha’s life. And its comments about life are as relatable as is the character of the flawed but admirable Asha.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/).
August 23, 2026
This novel focuses on fierce and irascible 70-year-old Asha Mohan, Bangalore-born and immigrant to Montreal, coming to terms with herself and her family. The story opens with a beloved, now diseased, old tree in her garden being cut down and Asha’s decision to hold a party, not to celebrate or or commemorate the change, but to acknowledge a kind of acceptance of life as it has unfolded—of old age, past errors, and family members for being who they are: her manipulative and rivalrous cousin, Meru; her wayward son, Dilip (on whom she blamed the death of her younger son, Gautam, many years before); her husband, Surash (from whom she has become estranged); and her daughter, Anjali, an accomplished visual artist.
Badami provides the reader with Asha’s early story, which includes the childhood loss of her father to cancer and Asha and her mother’s being taken in by her mother’s brother, an act much resented by her vindictive aunt and jealous cousin. Key to the story is a traumatic event, which Asha endured in the garden of her Montreal home on the day of her fiftieth birthday twenty years before—an event linked to her ne’er-do-well son, Dilip. Badami enlivens her narrative by providing separate chapters from the perspectives of the other important players in Asha’s life. We even get the point of view of a former landlady, who saw in the younger Asha something of herself.
While I enjoyed this book enough to complete it, I had some problems with Asha in Her Garden and found the execution—especially the tone—slightly uneven.
First of all, a niggle about a persistent grammatical error: Badami uses the subjective relative pronoun “who” when the objective one, “whom”, is required. I’m surprised a copy editor did not catch this.
Second problem: there’s an over-the-top, intentionally farcical section about the main character’s son, Dilip, who is supposed to be babysitting a dog as a favour to a friend, the son of a wealthy couple. Dilip’s neglect is the cause of the animal’s death. I loathe books in which animal suffering is made light of (or, in this case, used in an attempt to create a comic effect). Badami’s description of the character’s stuffing the very ill animal into a large suitcase to transport it in a taxi (so it won’t foul the seats) is not at all funny; it’s just disturbing. Surely the author could have come up with a better plot device than this to expose the young man’s complete and total irresponsibility. We are later expected to believe that Dilip reforms, becoming the millionaire owner of a chain-store dog-grooming business named for the dog he killed two decades before.
Third, if a person is taken to the ER after a fall and a CT reveals a subdural hematoma, a neurosurgeon, not a neurologist, is immediately called in.
What I’ve identified as problematic may not bother other readers. However, I feel the novel was diminished by these issues.
Badami provides the reader with Asha’s early story, which includes the childhood loss of her father to cancer and Asha and her mother’s being taken in by her mother’s brother, an act much resented by her vindictive aunt and jealous cousin. Key to the story is a traumatic event, which Asha endured in the garden of her Montreal home on the day of her fiftieth birthday twenty years before—an event linked to her ne’er-do-well son, Dilip. Badami enlivens her narrative by providing separate chapters from the perspectives of the other important players in Asha’s life. We even get the point of view of a former landlady, who saw in the younger Asha something of herself.
While I enjoyed this book enough to complete it, I had some problems with Asha in Her Garden and found the execution—especially the tone—slightly uneven.
First of all, a niggle about a persistent grammatical error: Badami uses the subjective relative pronoun “who” when the objective one, “whom”, is required. I’m surprised a copy editor did not catch this.
Second problem: there’s an over-the-top, intentionally farcical section about the main character’s son, Dilip, who is supposed to be babysitting a dog as a favour to a friend, the son of a wealthy couple. Dilip’s neglect is the cause of the animal’s death. I loathe books in which animal suffering is made light of (or, in this case, used in an attempt to create a comic effect). Badami’s description of the character’s stuffing the very ill animal into a large suitcase to transport it in a taxi (so it won’t foul the seats) is not at all funny; it’s just disturbing. Surely the author could have come up with a better plot device than this to expose the young man’s complete and total irresponsibility. We are later expected to believe that Dilip reforms, becoming the millionaire owner of a chain-store dog-grooming business named for the dog he killed two decades before.
Third, if a person is taken to the ER after a fall and a CT reveals a subdural hematoma, a neurosurgeon, not a neurologist, is immediately called in.
What I’ve identified as problematic may not bother other readers. However, I feel the novel was diminished by these issues.
August 17, 2026
Have I said how much I adore reading anything by Anita Rau Badami?
This one did not disappoint - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Indeed i loved it.
In this she does what she does best: Write about real people working through the complicated web of familial relationships impacted by the legacy of colonialism. In this case, against the backdrop of being a member of an immigrant community, in Montreal.
I’m so glad that the long wait is over. How long til the next title? Hopefully not 15 more years!
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.
This one did not disappoint - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Indeed i loved it.
In this she does what she does best: Write about real people working through the complicated web of familial relationships impacted by the legacy of colonialism. In this case, against the backdrop of being a member of an immigrant community, in Montreal.
I’m so glad that the long wait is over. How long til the next title? Hopefully not 15 more years!
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.
September 3, 2026
No es que sea la historia más novedosa que haya leído, pero el hilo conductor está muy bien armado. Los personajes son muy humanos, y tienen dudas en cuanto a ellos mismos, sus relaciones familiares y su posición en el mundo que creo que cada persona se ha planteado en la vida.
Tiene un final redondito, que trae paz. En ese sentido, parece como una "comfort reading".
Y por último, me gusta leer otras perspectivas sobre una ciudad que conozco.
Tiene un final redondito, que trae paz. En ese sentido, parece como una "comfort reading".
Y por último, me gusta leer otras perspectivas sobre una ciudad que conozco.
Did Not Finish
August 14, 2026DNF at 11%. I was finding it a chore to pick up this book. The pacing is slow, and the lack of chapters doesn't help.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews