A young student sits on a bench in a jardin in San Miguel. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has never been and 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.From three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and things unspoken. It is about mothers and marriage, about art and self-expression and the dark tug of familial and national violence, and about a young woman''s determination to forge her own identity.