Rosarita

Desai's slim novel puts a distancing device, second-person narration addressed to its protagonist Bonita, to unusually productive use: a Mexico City encounter with a stranger claiming to know Bonita's mother's hidden past forces open questions about Partition-era India and Mexico's own revolutionary history at once. Reviewers have responded to the way the book compresses two vast historical backdrops into a compact, almost hallucinatory family mystery. Some have found the withholding a genuine strength; others have found it frustrating on the page.