Anita Desai has lived in Delhi and London and Boston, but when she settled, she chose the Hudson River Valley, in New York State. She first came 40 years ago, to visit the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and was so impressed that she later made her home here, on one of the most dramatic stretches of the river.

“I discovered what a beautiful part of America this is,” recalled Desai, 87, sitting in her house in Cold Spring, her living room awash in sunlight and her walls lined with books.

The journey to this point has been long and winding for Desai. For years, she explored a variety of literary and artistic landscapes, from remote Indian ashrams to Mexican mining towns and suburban America, expanding in the process the horizons of generations of Indian writers, both at home and abroad. And now, though she has put down roots in one place, her imagination continues to roam widely.

Her new novella, “Rosarita,” is a slim, enigmatic mystery set in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a ghostly meditation on truth and memory, violence and art. In it, a visiting Indian student stumbles upon traces of her mother’s hidden past as an artist in 1950s Mexico — or is it just a mirage, fed by the “fantasies and falsehoods” of a local stranger?

Salman Rushdie has been a deep admirer of Desai’s work since early books such as “Clear Light of Day” (1980), which he said reminded him of Jane Austen. “Both Anita and Austen present a deceptively quiet and gentle surface to the reader,” Rushdie wrote over email, “beneath which lurks a ferocious intelligence and a sharp, often cutting wit.”

“Rosarita” signals a “new departure for Anita,” he added; with its air of mystery and otherworldliness, it suggests Jorge Luis Borges more than Austen.

A sense of foreignness and dislocation has shadowed Desai from the start. The daughter of a Bengali father and German mother, Desai said she never quite fit in with Indian families when she was growing up in Delhi.

She was 10 when India became independent, and she identified powerfully with the mission of the young country. “We were very proud of belonging to this new, independent India. Being part of this country of Nehru gave one great pride and sense of comfort in those years,” she remembered. “But I outgrew that — well, India outgrew that, too.”

When she began writing in the 1960s, she was influenced by a generation of post-independence authors like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who was her neighbor at the time, encouraged her literary pursuit. She soon found her material close by.

“That Old Delhi home and life was the one I knew best, the one I wrote about constantly,” Desai said. “After ‘Clear Light of Day,’ I became known as this woman writer who writes about a woman’s position in the family. I did it so often that I saw its limitations, and I wanted to open a door and step out of it.”

The book that opened that door was “In Custody” (1984), an elegy for the rarefied, male world of Urdu poetry that captured “the decline of a language, a literature and a culture,” Kalpana Raina, a Kashmiri-born writer and translator, said over email. It remains one of Desai’s most beloved works, and went on to become a successful Merchant-Ivory film in 1993.

Desai’s work expanded further in the years to come, with a string of novels — “Baumgartner’s Bombay” (1988), “Journey to Ithaca” (1995) and “Fasting, Feasting” (1999) — that featured an assortment of strangers in strange lands.

Desai herself had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s to teach writing at M.I.T. The harsh winters, among other things, were a shock to her system. As the snow piled up that first year, she booked an escape to Oaxaca, in Mexico, never expecting she’d return to the country often over the years.

“Getting to know Mexico opened up another world for me, another life,” she said. “It’s strange because it’s so like India, I feel utterly at home there. And yet there’s something about Mexico that’s surrealistic rather than realistic.”

“Rosarita” — like her 2004 novel “The Zigzag Way” — has been a way for Desai to reimagine Mexico in her fiction. When she came upon the story of the Punjabi artist Satish Gujral, who studied with Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, she began to envision a narrative that linked the “wounds, mutilations” of two violent historical events: Indian partition, which cleaved the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947, and the Mexican Revolution, a civil war that began in 1910.

Over time, she teased out the fragments of her tale, weaving in a mother-daughter story line as well — “the most familiar part,” she said. It was a mystery even to her, she admitted, where it would all lead. One thing she did know, though, was that it would be a novella, compressed and impressionistic. She had enjoyed writing her collection of novellas, “The Artist of Disappearance,” published in 2011, and the form suited her.

“It doesn’t take the immense energy and stamina that the novel requires,” she said. “You can finish it before it finishes you.”

While Desai claims this may be her last book, she is relishing the experience of watching her daughter Kiran continue the journey. Kiran’s debut, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” appeared in 1998, just after India’s 50th anniversary. Her follow-up, “The Inheritance of Loss” — a masterwork that spanned Harlem and the Himalayas and awed her mother — won the 2006 Booker Prize. Rushdie has called the mother-daughter pair “the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.”

Kiran is part of an impressive group of Indian novelists who emerged in the globalized 1990s, a far cry from the closed and isolated world her mother knew as a young writer in English decades earlier. “There has, of course, been a huge blossoming since that time and a more seamless connection between India and its diaspora authors,” Kiran explained over email. “I do think it is important to remember that it was lonely writers like my mother who opened the door for subsequent generations.”

Kiran calls her mother’s long writing life a “gift,” and isn’t so sure it’s done yet.

“She was born in British India and lived through such enormous changes,” added Kiran, who often works alongside her mother at her scenic home by the Hudson. “Now she always tells me she isn’t writing, but every time I pass her room I see her at her desk. Her days, at 87, are still entirely made of reading books, reading about books, and writing. It’s as if her whole life has been lived inside the world of art, every experience processed through this lens.”

THE GRANDDAUGHTER, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Charlotte Collins.

When it comes to women revealing what they really think about their families after they die, it’s hard to top Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, reflecting from beyond the grave on the grudges and loathing she lived with as the unwilling matriarch of a dysfunctional Mississippi brood. A century later in Germany, the dead woman at the center of Bernhard Schlink’s new novel, “The Granddaughter,” gives Addie a run for her money.

Birgit grows up in East Germany after the war and dies in her 70s in unified Berlin. Her husband, a bookseller named Kaspar, finds her body drowned in the bathtub of their well-appointed apartment and can’t tell if her overdose was accidental or intentional. Bereft, he receives a postmortem query from a publisher about the manuscript Birgit was writing, which she never showed him. He finds and reads what seems to be an autobiography of Birgit’s thoroughly embittered life, much of which she kept secret from him: from her young love affair with an older Communist Party officer that left her pregnant and alone, to her passionless marriage to Kaspar in Berlin, where she endured years of triumphalist condescension from West Germans. She writes regretfully and searingly about her hopes to someday meet the daughter she abandoned at birth. All that Kaspar knows for certain is that Birgit turned to alcohol and pills to numb her many pains. “I am not a monster,” Birgit reflects, defensively, regarding the freedom she felt in the moments after letting her newborn go.

Instead of disagreeing, Kaspar finds a new purpose in his dead wife’s failures and frustrations: He decides to find Birgit’s daughter. This premise will feel familiar to readers of Schlink’s previous novels — including his best-selling “The Reader” (1995), which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film — many of which use individual relationships as proxies for examining the ongoing legacies of World War II and the Cold War in his native country. Schlink is not as elusive or cerebral a writer about modern Germany as W.G. Sebald, nor as intense or unflinching a storyteller as Jenny Erpenbeck; but he writes instructive tales that adeptly raise difficult questions and propose appealing answers.

In “The Granddaughter,” translated into clear and accessible English by Charlotte Collins, these answers are found along Kaspar’s journey into the former East Germany, where he eventually tracks down Birgit’s daughter, Svenja, who was raised by her birth father and his wife and never knew about Birgit. In and out of reform school as a teenager, Svenja now leads a quiet rural life with her neo-Nazi husband and 14-year-old daughter, surrounded by fellow proponents of a purist Germany who reject national guilt over the “Holocaust lie” and commit themselves to defending “the glory of the Fatherland” from foreign influence. Meeting them, Kaspar exhibits a measured, even respectful curiosity about their enthusiasm for ideas and attitudes that produced the most destructive period of modern world history. His fair-mindedness throughout the novel is so exemplary it becomes wearisome.

What follows is a rather schematic plot turn in which Kaspar persuades Svenja and her husband to let their daughter, Sigrun — whose “heroes” include Irma Grese, an infamously brutal young guard in the women’s sections of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen — visit him in Berlin every few months, in exchange for payments from Birgit’s estate. This they decide after Kaspar has met the couple only twice — a couple who are protective and generally distrusting and knew nothing about Birgit, let alone Kaspar, a week earlier. But the all-too-convenient arrangement allows Schlink do what he really wants to with this novel: stage an intergenerational encounter in contemporary Germany between a responsibly contrite, open-minded, aging postwar German and a rebellious, confidently nationalist post-unification teenager.

And so Sigrun spends more than a year traveling between her home and Kaspar’s, where she has her own bedroom and piano lessons, where the two cook and travel and go to the philharmonic and museums together, and where Kaspar patiently tries to convince her of the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary. Unsurprisingly, this “Pygmalion”-style denazification project involves giving her books to inform and challenge her worldview, which inevitably leads to conflicts back home.

After disappearing from his life without warning, Sigrun shows up again on Kaspar’s doorstep two years later, needing him to hide her from the police. At 18 she has inherited her mother’s stubbornness, which ironically makes her rebel against Svenja’s “Völkisch” politics and Third Reich nostalgia. She’s eager to fight in the streets for her own vision for Germany — especially against her leftist peers — which Schlink shrewdly conveys as a kind of reactionary idealism to what she perceives as the political mushiness of her parents’ generation.

However disappointed and worried he becomes about Sigrun’s situation, Kaspar remains unconditionally supportive, losing his temper only once, on the perfectly calculated occasion of delivering an impassioned speech in defense of moderation — to a Sigrun who proves, also conveniently, more and more open to her step-grandfather’s perspective.

And so this novel, finally too pleasing and affirming for readers who are rightly worried about political violence and radicalized youth, ends with a dignified old man envisioning a stable, cosmopolitan future for a wayward young girl. Some will read Schlink’s latest as an inspiring fable of intergenerational unity and redemption. Others might find it more like fantasy fiction.

THE GRANDDAUGHTER | By Bernhard Schlink | Translated by Charlotte Collins | HarperVia | 326 pp. | $28.99