From three times Booker-shortlisted writer Anita Desai, Rosarita is an exquisite story of art, memory and what happens when the past threatens to re-write the present.

'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

"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 together" - Financial Times

"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" - The Irish Times

"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" - The Daily Telegraph

"One of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers" - The New Yorker

"Anita Desai writes exquisitely" - The 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

"Desai writes powerfully and provocatively . . . Rosarita is a transcendent late gift: both a testament to Desai’s enduring genius as a writer and a wholly remarkable vindication of literature’s power to illuminate the conundrums of human experience. This is a novel of profound philosophical inquiry" - The Guardian

"Strikingly vivid . . . this book is the literary equivalent of a lucid dream, a surreal and deeply personal experience " - The Skinny

"The perfect read for a sultry summer afternoon" - The i

"Swirling under the delicacy of the prose is a terrible turbulence. Who was Rosarita?" - The Times Literary Supplement

"The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and limitations for its effects. Rosarita does both." - Spectator