Rosarita cover art

Rosarita

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Rosarita

By: Anita Desai
Narrated by: Meera Simhan
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

'Anita Desai is a magnificent writer' - Salman Rushdie
'Every new work from her is a gift' - Kamila Shamsie
'
Rosarita is transcendent . . . a testament to Desai’s enduring genius as a writer' - The Guardian
'Tantalising' -
Financial Times

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. 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.


**Praise for Meera Simhan**

'With vocal agility Simhan deftly shifts her tone and accent to realistically narrate diverse characters . . . Simhan's strength lies in narrating emotionally fraught passages that will move listeners' - AudioFile Magazine

©2024 Anita Desai (P)2024 Macmillan Publishers International Limited
Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism World Literature Latin American Mexico
All stars
Most relevant  
Im usually a big fan of Desai's work - this is incredibly slow despite it also being very short. it's so bad, i'm going to return it. avoid

tedious

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Very little story, almost none, the book is reads like a (lyrical) guidebook of small Mexican villages/towns and travelling between them. Other than that, there's really no story at all. Also it is the length of a short story, but costs same as a full novel. I kept waiting for the story to develop or even to unfold a bit, but...NOTHING happens...and then suddenly, it ends. With no conclusion.

Utterly disappointing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.