ROSARITA

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