Rosarita
Anita Desai
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Recommended by Victoria
‘Rosarita is the acclaimed novelist Anita Desai’s latest book. The novel follows a young Indian woman on her language trip to Mexico, where she is confronted with the supposed fact that her mother – then and there known as Rosarita – once came to this exact town to pursue her art. But what art? When did her mother ever leave India? And why? Desai’s masterful storytelling takes us on a journey across Mexico and across time, exploring themes of post-colonialism, gender politics and intimate family relationships.’
From the publisher
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
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