From three times Booker Prize-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, isolation, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path.
Bonita, a young student from India, sits on a park bench in San Miguel, Mexico – where she has arrived to learn Spanish. She is alone in this place to which she has no connection. It feels like bliss.
And then a woman approaches her, claiming to recognize Bonita, because she is the spitting image of her mother who supposedly made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother did not 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, as the past threatens to flood the present, or, perhaps, even rewrite it.
'Anita Desai is a magnificent writer' SALMAN RUSHDIE
'To compare Anita Desai's fiction with that of Chekhov or the short stories of Tolstoy is not extravagant; it is entirely warranted' IRISH TIMES
