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by Anita Desai
From "world-class writer" (The Washington Post) and three-time Booker finalist Anita Desai, an exquisitely written stunning exploration of love, place, memory, history, and the secrets between a mother and her daughter.
Away from her home in India to study Spanish, Bonita sits on a bench in El Jardin de San Miguel, Mexico, basking in the park's lush beauty, when she slowly becomes aware that she is being watched. An elderly woman approaches her, claiming that she knew Bonita's mother—that they had been friends when Bonita's mother had lived in Mexico as a talented young artist. Bonita tells the stranger that she must be mistaken; her mother was not a painter and had never travelled to Mexico. Though the stranger leaves, Bonita cannot shake the feeling that she is being followed.
Days later, haunted by the encounter, Bonita seeks out the woman, whom she calls The Trickster, and follows her on a tour of what may, or may not, have been her mother's past. As a series of mysterious events brilliantly unfold, Bonita is unable to escape The Trickster's presence, as she is forced to confront questions of truth and identity, and specters of familial and national violence.
A masterpiece of storytelling from a gifted writer, Rosarita is a profound mediation on mothers and marriage, art and self-expression, and how the traumas from the past can impact future generations.
Barak Obama's 2025 Summer Reading List
1m Since someone mentioned it, https://barackobama.medium.com/my-2025-summer-reading-list-bb25331e761b here you go : • Mark Twain — Ron Chernow A comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history. • The Book of Records — Madeleine Thien A bea...
-kim.kovacs
"[P]rovocative if underdeveloped...[I]ntriguing questions are raised, but Desai merely skims the surface of her protagonist's emotions. This will leave readers wanting more." —Publishers Weekly
"Desai is exceptionally attuned to the power of suggestion, tug of secrets, mutability of memories, and the anguish of women denied lives of their choosing. Her profound sense of place yields exquisitely rendered scenes saturated with the land's bloody past and the traumas families inherit. As Bonita's quest leads her to the sea, Desai leaves us stunned by nature's glory and humanity's capacity for horror and joy, loneliness and love." —Booklist
"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. In Rosarita, the known rubs up against the unknown, and a kaleidoscopic network of possible lives are lost and found in barely 100 pages." —Financial Times (UK)
"A novel about storytelling, history and belonging. It is about the desire to know one's forebears, and therefore gain a greater insight into oneself…a beautiful rejoinder to the glib and common-place phrase one hears far too much today: it is what it is…There is a dreamy and wistful mood to this very short gem, lulling in its revelations and comforting in its gentle appeal. A wonder of a novel." —Irish Independent
"Rosarita is not the Desai of Clear Light of Day (1980) or Fasting, Feasting (1999), those great, studiously realist and Booker shortlisted novels of Indian family life. This is a much more ludic tale, as taut and weird and entrancing as a story by Jorge Luis Borges. If it is to be her swansong – Desai is 87 years old – then it's a magnificent way to go out." —The Telegraph (UK)
This information about Rosarita was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anita Desai is a renowned author born and educated in India. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting. She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in New York.
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