Emma recommends... Rosarita - Anita Desai | SIGNED EDITION

Emma recommends... Rosarita is the latest from the incredible, long-established (now in her 90s!) Anita Desai. An exquisite short novel - haunting and, possibly, haunted - about personal and national legacies of trauma and violence, self-expression, and finding your own way. Imagine Claire Keegan transported to Mexico via India! This is a moving and mesmerizing read - a perfect piece of writing.

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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.