Synopsis
'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
Details
04 July 2024
9781035044436Reviews
It’s been over a decade since [Anita Desai's] last work of fiction. 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 giftKamila Shamsie, Stylist
As taut and weird and entrancing as a story by Jorge Luis Borges. If Rosarita is to be her swansong . . . then it’s a magnificent way to go outGeorge Cochrane, The Telegraph (5 star review)
The three-times Booker-shortlisted writer is back with a poignant novella about one young woman’s thwarted attempt to escape her past . . . a thoughtful read that will delight Desai stalwarts and send newcomers scurrying to her impressive backlist; leaving all hopeful this won’t be her last piece of short fictionSusie Mesure, The i
A tantalising tale of memory, family and fantasy . . . evocative, subtle and enigmatic. Desai revels in equivocation and possibility, embracing the ambiguity of memory itself to tell a shimmering, sometimes fevered tale in which a mother and daughter are pulled apart and fused togetherFinancial Times
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