Picador secures first new fiction from Desai in 10 years

Picador has secured three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai’s first fiction in 10 years.

Sophie Jonathan, publishing director, and Mary Mount, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth print, digital and audio rights in Rosarita from Peter Straus at RCW. It will publish in summer 2024.

Set in Mexico in the present and India in the past, Rosarita is described as “a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and things unspoken”.

The publisher said: “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.”

It continued: “Anita Desai is one of the great writers of contemporary literature and Rosarita is an exquisite work of art. Play-like, understated and graceful, Rosarita is a story both glorious and tragic, full of mischief and sadness. It deserves to be an instant classic.”

Desai said: “Picador has been the most welcoming home my novella could have found and I am immensely grateful.”