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.

About the Author

Born and educated in India, Anita Desai is the author of Rosarita. She has written many novels and short stories, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature.