Description

‘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

Publisher Review

I can’t wait for the new Anita Desai novel, Rosarita. She’s a writer I’ve loved since my adolescence, whose sharp observations and elegant sentences I admire increasingly as the years go on. Every new work from her is a gift. — Kamila Shamsie, Stylist Summer Reads Her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive * The Times * 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 * Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture — Alison Lurie All her stories are full of a confidence in human nature that is a rarity and a pleasure to encounter * The Spectator * Desai has a wicked, subtle humour…and her characters are beautifully described… Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays * Daily Telegraph * One of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers * New Yorker * Anita Desai writes exquisitely * Scotsman * She has the ability to shape and refine a piece of work of her own intense imagination into an independent work of art * The Times *