The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity … it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.“ (The Booker Prizes) Kiran Desai’s return to the literary world in 2025 came with the announcement that The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton, 5 August 2025) had been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize— nearly twenty years after she won the prize for The Inheritance of Loss.

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train in India— Sonia holding a book, Sunny recognising a kindred spirit—they are drawn together like an inevitability. Later they are embarrassed by the grandparents who once tried to matchmake them, and friction between their families over a cook—clumsy family engineering that left a residue of awkward fate. For long sections of the novel Sonia and Sunny live in an almost anguished suspended state, parallel lives like train tracks speeding along to their destiny shaped by country, class, race, history, and crucially, uncomfortable family ties.

Sonia, back in India after her writing studies in Vermont, is wrecked by a relationship that broke her open—a married artist who fed on her beauty, humiliated her, and left a presence that, like an unseen eye she cannot escape. Sunny, living in New York in the United States, is a young journalist trying to outrun the warring factions of his clan whose menace follows him everywhere, and his overbearing widowed mother’s expectations.

Theirs is a love based on impossibility. From the opening chapter comes the line that holds the book’s central ache: “She says she is lonely.” The scene is set in Allahabad, in the wintry blur before dawn. Ba, Dadaji, and their unmarried daughter, Mina, sit on the veranda wrapped in shawls, planning their meals. Around them, crows erupt into their morning chorus, their harsh cries rising over their conversation. The kebabs for Mina’s birthday dinner have been marinating overnight. Two telephones ring from opposite corners of the house. It is Sonia’s father, Manav, wanting to speak to his father, Dadaji.

Here is an extract from the Booker Prizes website:

‘We are worried about Sonia,’ Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. ‘She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.’ ‘But why?’ asked Dadaji. ‘She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?’ ‘She says she is lonely.’ It is the first tremor in a novel that knows how loneliness travels —across continents, through families, into adulthood.

Kiran Desai’s capacity to write emotional truths traces back to the life she lived before she started writing. Born in New Delhi in 1971, she moved through several Indian cities—Pune, Chandigarh, Delhi—before leaving India at fourteen. Her mother, Anita Desai, had accepted a fellowship in England, and the two moved again, this time to the United States, where Anita joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke. Writers who cross borders early carry two landscapes at once: the remembered one, and the one being formed beneath their feet. That doubleness, that in-between, is the undertow in their work. Her mother had already built a life in literature. Anita Mazumdar Desai was born in Mussoorie in 1937 to a German mother and a Bengali father, raised in Old Delhi among German inside the home, Hindi and Urdu in the streets, English in school. She has said that although she writes in English, the rhythms of Hindi and Urdu move beneath the sentences.

Anita Desai has been herself shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times— in 1980, 1984, 1999—each time deepening her reputation as one of the most psychologically astute writers of her generation. You feel it in Clear Light of Day, set in Old Delhi, where the Das siblings revisit a childhood marked by silence and resentment. You feel it again in Fasting, Feasting, which follows one daughter constrained by domestic expectation and a son sent to America, where abundance hides its own forms of loneliness. Kiran’s writerly life came from observing her mother. “Every morning, as soon as we left for school, she would run to her desk and start writing,” she said of Anita.

Kiran studied at Bennington, Hollins, and Columbia, as her mother wrote through raising four children, through the bureaucratic rhythms of Delhi, through the academic semesters of Massachusetts and later MIT. Kiran’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, appeared in 1998. Playful, satirical, it told the story of a young man who climbs into a guava tree and refuses to come down, accidentally becoming a holy man. Even in her twenties, Kiran Desai wrote about a kind of loneliness, a gap, distance, from society, from oneself. Then, in 2006, came The Inheritance of Loss, the book that cemented her place in English literature.

Set between Kalimpong during the Gorkhaland unrest and the immigrant kitchens of New York, the novel studies class, displacement, aspiration of people living beyond their means. It contains one of her most enduring lines: “The past climbed out and stood there.” The novel won the Man Booker Prize. Onstage, Kiran thanked her mother first. She said she owed her “a debt so profound” that the book felt “as much hers as mine.” Years later, in Ottawa, Anita described her daughter’s novel as “a profound book.” It was a hard won inheritance.

During the nearly twenty years between novels, Kiran Desai reportedly read and reread the writers who formed her. Calvino. García Márquez. Rulfo. Bolaño. Kawabata. You feel that labour of twenty years in every line. In her Booker interview Desai said she wanted to write “a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty” and then realised she was writing not only about romantic loneliness but also “the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world.” Among other things, the novel restores an India fading at the edges—an older India with its echoing past and fraying grace, before the polished brightness of today’s new India wiped away its blurred beauty entirely. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, when it came, peels open like an onion, revealing the internal scaffolding of families: the cycle of expectations, disappointment, guilt, layers of loneliness, and astonishingly, amidst all this debris, for love, to live. For me, it is the best novel I’ve read—in form and in content—a work that moves beyond plot, place, theme, beyond thought and dream, into something singular, as though Desai, deity-like, had “swallowed the world” and released it back to us on earth, having transformed its mangled, sometimes senseless, debris with great labour and talent into a place we long to remain in a little longer.