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 Times
 
From 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**
 
‘Hypnotically beautiful and subtle’
Financial Times
 
‘Bewitchingly beautiful’
The Times
 
‘Profoundly elegiac’
New Statesman