Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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."—Donna Seaman, 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)
“If you've never read anything by Anita Desai, you're out of excuses. One of India's most celebrated writers, she's been publishing for almost 50 years and come close to winning the Booker Prize three times…a world-class writer… Desai takes a certain perverse pleasure in exposing the self-pity of mediocre people; if Anita Brookner were a little meaner, she might write like this.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
About the Author
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.