The heroes in The Hero's Walk are a very ordinary couple ("like a pair of bullock yoked together endlessly turning the water wheel round and round, eyes bent to the earth")—a 57-year-old grandfather, Sripati Rao, who makes a living writing jingles for toothpowder and incense and has a secret passion for penning elaborate letters to the editor, and his very practical ("like a bar of Lifebuoy soap") wife, Nirmala, who runs a dance school in her decrepit living room apart from a household of a grasping, thieving mother-in-law with a weakness for chewing gum, a 42-year-old spinster sister-in-law lusting after the milkman-turned-mla's son next door, a jobless son who spends his days trying to save the world and a seven-year-old struck mute by tragedy. In this breathless 359 page-turner, Badami addresses with skill, humour and tenderness one of the deepest preoccupations of any novelist: the beauty and randomness of existence and its acceptance. "I find it touchingly heroic to just see people living from the day they're born until the day they die, so full of hope," Badami told an interviewer when her book was first released in Canada a year ago. That reverence for the ordinary suffuses this novel with a rare lyricism as it takes the couple—and the reader—through the whole gamut of emotions accompanying the death of a child: rage and recrimination, guilt, despair, futility and then, as softly, inevitably, as the break of dawn, the rebirth of love and hope.