Rosarita

‘Anita Desai is a magnificent writer’ – Salman Rushdie’Every new work from her is a gift’ – Kamila Shamsie’Rosarita is transcendent . . . a testament to Desai’s enduring genius as a writer’ – The Guardian’Tantalising’ – Financial TimesFrom three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path.

A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.

And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.

Praise for Anita Desai ‘Bewitchingly beautiful’ – The Times‘Profoundly elegiac’ – New Statesman