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.