Anita Desai’s ‘beautiful novella’ Rosarita features on Barack Obama’s 2025 Summer Reading List

Former US President Barack Obama’s handwritten note praising Rosarita.  (Source: obama.org)

Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting story about memory, grief, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path. It focuses on Bonita, a student in San Miguel, Mexico, learning Spanish and relishing her solitude. Then a stranger interrupts. A woman who insists Bonita is the image of her mother, who once traveled from India to Mexico as a young artist. Bonita is certain her mother never painted, never lived such a life. Yet the stranger’s conviction draws her into a story where mother and daughter drift apart and circle back together, as the past threatens to overwhelm the present, or rewrite it entirely.

Critics have long admired Desai’s lyrical restraint and her gift for atmosphere. The Times called her writing “bewitchingly beautiful,” while the New Statesman has described her work as “profoundly elegiac.”

Obama’s picks

The 10 books former US President Barack Obama read in 2025. (Source: obama.org)

“Reading has always been an important part of my journey, which is why I couldn’t be more excited that we’ll have a new branch of the Chicago Public Library at the Obama Presidential Center when it opens next year,” Obama wrote as he introduced the list.

“For now, I figured I’d share some of the books I’ve read recently, along with some notes about why I liked them — and why you might, too. Take a look and let me know what I should check out next. And with everything going on right now, I didn’t have time to put a summer playlist together this year, but send me songs that I should listen to for my year-end playlist.”

Other picks included Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain, which he called “a comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history.” Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, which the former US President called “a beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognise our common humanity,” and S A Cosby’s King of Ashes, which received high praise  as “one of my favorite crime fiction writers delivers in this story of family, ambition and corruption in a racially charged and violent South.”

In non-fiction he endorsed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance as “a must-read for progressives,” Michael Lewis’s Who is Government? “a timely reminder of the quiet dedication and skill” of public servants, while Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call is “a useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy.”