Sonia is a young Indian writer finishing college in Vermont. Sunny is a recent Columbia graduate copy editing at the Associated Press in New York. Their grandparents tried to arrange a marriage between them years before they ever met, on the not-unreasonable theory that two single Indian kids of the right age and family ought to at least give it a go. The kids ignored this. Then, one evening on an overnight train in India, they finally meet. What follows is a love story that took Desai almost two decades to write properly, moving between Vermont, New York, Delhi, and points in between, threading the lives of dozens of family members through the slow churn of the postcolonial world.
"Ambitious and accomplished." — 2025 Booker Prize judges
About the Author
Kiran Desai was born in 1971 in New Delhi, the daughter of the novelist Anita Desai. She left India at fourteen, lived briefly in England, and then settled in the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington, Hollins, and Columbia. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Man Booker Prize in 2006. And then she went very, very quiet. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is her third novel, and it arrived nineteen years after her last one. She has said in interviews that she rewrote the manuscript many times and lived inside the world of the book for so long that her characters came to feel as familiar as her own family. The wait, by every account that matters, was worth it. The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and landed on Barack Obama's list of favorite books for the year.
"Hot takes and chilly optimized productivity." — Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times
Why It's Worth Your Time
Most novels that arrive to this kind of welcome have a single trick they do very well. Desai's has the opposite quality. It is patient where contemporary fiction tends to be punchy, and roomy where contemporary fiction tends to be tight. She follows her two leads across continents and decades, but she also follows their grandmothers, their landlords, their bosses, their cousins, the strangers they meet on the train. Desai has talked about wanting to write loneliness in all its shapes. The loneliness of being between countries. The loneliness of being between languages. The loneliness of being between a self you grew up with and a self you became somewhere else. She has also said she wanted to write about the kind of loneliness that is actually peace, the solitude that is sought out, the quiet of a life that has stopped trying to prove anything to anyone. The novel does both, and it does them through the slow, almost domestic accumulation of detail that you can only earn by sitting with a book for years. There is a reason the Booker judges called it her most ambitious work.
Before You Start
This is a long novel and a slow one in the best sense. It is not the book to grab for an airport read or a single weekend. Give it a couple of weeks and let it unspool. If you read The Inheritance of Loss and loved it, you already know Desai's signature, which is a sentence-level attention that rewards rereading and a willingness to follow a minor character down an alley for ten pages just because the alley is interesting. If you have not read her before, this is a fine place to start. The novel works on its own. Some readers will want to follow up afterward by going back to The Inheritance of Loss, or to her mother Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day. The Desais are a writing family in the way the Brontës were a writing family. Both are worth knowing.