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

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