The Hero's Walk was Anita Rau Badami's second novel, and it garnered multiple awards and international attention since it was published in 2001. The book was a Canada Reads contender in 2016, being championed by actor Vinay Virmani.

The Hero's Walk is a family saga set in a small town in India. When his estranged daughter and her husband die in a car accident, the family patriarch must take in a seven-year-old Canadian granddaughter he has never met.

"Every time I begin a new novel, I feel like I am starting over, and the challenge is to write a better book. I was a complete novice when I wrote my first novel, Tamarind Mem, which was actually the thesis for my Master's degree in English literature. The imperative then was not so much to get published, but to pass my thesis defence. So in some ways, The Hero's Walk felt like a first book, an adventure, a journey into the unknown. But it was also a book that came easily to me. I put a lot of work into it, reworked it many times, but the process never did feel onerous or anything less than joyous."

"The Hero's Walk was originally the story of Sripathi Rao's sister Putti and his mother Ammayya. But very early in the writing process, I realised that they were fine for a short story but not complex enough to anchor an entire novel about heroism and forgiveness and what these might involve in the lives of ordinary human beings. This realisation was gradual, and at first I was reluctant to get rid of the two women. But once I realized that they could stay on as secondary characters, act as prismatic facets to bounce off various ideas that I was exploring in this book, and add richness and variety to it, I was okay. Sripathi Rao started to assume a textured life, and the story developed fast."

"I realized that I needed a catalyst to link all the characters and threads of story which were still, at that point, feeling unconnected. And so after a few months of writing and rewriting and tearing up pages, I found seven-year-old Nandana, thanks to a real-life tale told to me by a friend about two young children who were abruptly orphaned and had to move from the U.S. to another country with family they did not know."

"I don't think I have ever experienced writer's block — I don't recall running out of ideas when I was working on The Hero's Walk. There might have been moments when I was frustrated because the story was not going the way I wanted it to, or the characters did not feel real enough, or the structure seemed clunky. In those instances, I did what I always do — left the annoying section alone for a bit, moved on to another chapter, planned some other aspect of the story, or worked on a different project altogether. This way, my writing mind is never silent but active and alive and engaged. And when I come back to the offending bit, I do so with renewed energy and ideas."

"It is hard to explain how I know when a book is finished. Instinct, I suppose, a sense of finality, a certain knowledge that I have taken the characters and their tales as far as I can and now it is time to let them be, to turn them over, hopefully, to a reader who will love them as much as I did and be as invested in their lives."