Book Review
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
Following a 19-year wait since her Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – an ambitious novel that more than justifies the long wait. Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, this epic intercontinental story explores love, family, belonging, and the restless search for identity in a rapidly globalising world.
At its heart, the novel follows the two titular characters, whose lives circle one another but never quite align. Sonia, a homesick Indian student in Vermont, turns to an older artist for intimacy and inspiration, an encounter that casts a lingering shadow over her life. Sunny, a Delhi-born journalist struggling in Brooklyn, is equally adrift, torn between his girlfriend, his ambitions, and his desire to find his place in America.
Spanning the mid-1990s to the early 2000s and moving across India, the United States, Italy, and Mexico, the novel is both intimate and expansive. It interrogates the fractures of migration, the weight of cultural expectation, and the pull of familial history. The prose is rich and lyrical – sometimes meandering, sometimes surreal, yet consistently engrossing. Desai brings families, lovers, and even entire cities to life with striking clarity. The narrative threads are as much about ideas as they are about events, touching on colonialism, globalisation, art, storytelling, and the legacies of trauma. Like the best family sagas, it reveals how individuals are shaped not only by their personal choices but also by the histories and forces that precede them.
This is at once a love story, a comedy, a tragedy, and a meditation on identity. Above all, it is a novel meant to be discussed, mulled over, and shared. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a triumph: bold, thoughtful, and beautifully written.
