Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a forthcoming family saga about two young Indian adults navigating identity, ambition and belonging. Sonia, an aspiring novelist, feels isolated and adrift after graduating from college in Vermont and moving to New York City. Sunny, a journalist also based in NYC, struggles to reconcile his Indian heritage with his American ambitions. Their stories are interwoven with those of their complicated families back in New Delhi, adding depth to the narrative.

At nearly 700 pages, this novel is quite a commitment, but a rewarding one. As always, I love learning about different cultures through fiction.

This book is so full of ideas... it is a tour de force of exploration of life experiences. It is a family saga and character exploration that feels authentic and important to the conversation around family, career, immigration, expectation, and life experience. I loved reading this book and I think I would enjoy a re-read even more, it is long and dense and thoroughly enjoyable.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader's copy of this book to be published September 23, 2025

Be prepared to be engulfed by this beautifully written novel that tells one big story and many important smaller ones. Though the book has many pages, more than 700, the end comes all too quickly. Literary fiction readers should rejoice over Desai’s triumph.

Wow. This book was not what I expected. I am not even sure how to rate it since I skimmed through the last 40% of this book. I am grateful to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this book but I am finding that the blurb and quotes about this book are misleading. It describes the book as "a spellbinding story of two young people, an epic of love." Or "deeply romantic" and "a grand and stirring love story." I was expecting a literary romance, a story of two people who'se lives keep gtting in the way of their love. Instead, the book is epic in it's meandering through so many characters and so many lives! What starts out as a story about Sunny and Sonia becomes a story about Sonia's grandparents and her aunt, then Sonia's grandfather and Sunny's best friend, Sonia's mother and Sonia's father and the last 40% of this book suddenly becomes almost more about Sunny's mother than anyone else. Finally, the book collapses into a magical realism resolution involving a character that has become a fantastical villain.

I found that the author's lyrical writing style was sometimes quite charming. And I learned a hell of a lot about Indian culture. But I can't give this book any more than 2.5 stars rounded down.

Thank you NetGalley,author,Kieran Desai,Random House Pubs for the opportunity to read the arc ebook,Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. The book was extremely long,700 pages covering two families and their two children who are very much in love. There were so many well written themes to cover in this review to give it the credit they all deserved,it was difficult for me.Trust me when I say I don’t give five stars to books that are unworthy of them.
On sale,September 23,2025

Thank you @netgalley and @hogarth imprint of @randomhouse for the e-ARC. All views are my own.

What an immersive experience this book was. I'm not surprised it is on the @Booker long list and that Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny needs to be sipped and savored slowly. I wish I took a little longer reading, but September school year was looming. It is not a traditional romance by any means. It's truly the lives of both Sonia and Sunny, and their extended families. Their families, uncles, aunts, and the values of Indian are what shape the expectations and pressures both characters are feeling in their young adult lives.

The loneliness of the emigrant experience in America as young adults is well done by Kiran Desai. The desire and need to fit into a different culture while escaping the suffocation of your own country was balanced beautifully. Back home in India, we learn about the parents and extended families. While not in the same locations, this felt like talking to my own family in India when I visited. The conversations were so authentically real.

This is a coming of age story about finding yourself while battling spiritual family history, familial expectations, cultural confusion, sexism, colonialism, and so much more. Pick this up if you're in the mood for a family saga.

Favorite quote: “There are worse things than loneliness.” Loneliness could mean abiding peace. It could mean understanding your happiness backward, when you happened to exclaim out loud, surprising yourself when there was no apparent reason, I'm happy!”

This is a difficult book to read. Setting aside the extensive use of Indian terms which may not be familiar to a Western reader, the writing, while at times masterful, is dense and overly descriptive. Why use one or two words to describe something when six or eight will suffice? There was no reason for this story to be almost 700 pages long.

There were a few entertaining characters, although the title characters were not among them. The use of magical realism left me confused at times. I’m sure there is an audience for this, but I’m afraid it wasn’t a good fit for me.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a gorgeous book. I adored it. It transported me to so many other times and places. I was swept up in the various relationships, though Sonia and Sunny's most especially. It's a long read, which might not appeal to everyone, but the final scenes made it worth all the time I spent with this book.

This one took me a bit of time to get into as it's long but so worth it! Sonia and Sunny are both immigrants whose grandparents once tried their hands at matchmaking. Now they "re-meet" on a train and we get their beautiful--sometimes tragic history. They must navigate so much--together and apart--as they deal with class history, race, and generations of misunderstandings and resentments. It's both heartwarming and painful at some points but so worth the read!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is a sprawling, deeply layered novel that uses the parallel lives of two Indian students in 1990s America to explore themes of displacement, identity, and the desire for connection. Sonia and Sunny are each caught between meeting their families' expectations of them and also developing their own desires and identities. Desai brings emotional depth and sharp insight to their respective journeys. Their stories unfold not only across continents, but also within generations, drawing richly textured portraits of their families’ histories.

This is a chunky novel and is wordy at times, but it is also a modern epic. It is deeply emotional and explores what it's like to be caught between two cultures while trying to appease both. Desai also examines the toll of immigration, the tension between tradition and freedom, and the particular loneliness that comes from straddling two worlds. I can definitely see why this book is on the Booker longlist. Really excellent!

The book explores so many themes: Identity, isolation, family, and connection through the interwoven stories of Sonia, an aspiring novelist, and Sunny, a journalist, as they navigate their immigrant experiences in America and their complex family legacies in India.

There are so many characters to both love and dislike.

Many of insights/observations that both Sonia and Sunny share as Indian immigrants in the US had this reader constantly nodding in agreement, Loneliness as a premise of being American. Being an individual is being alone. My absolute favorite was "nosiness" ..seeing someone reading a book and positioning yourself to decipher the title. Is this to possibly start a conversation with a stranger? I fit this description but tend to label it as curiosity vs nosiness (who wants to be a Gladys Kravitz).

The characters in the book will stay with me for a long time. I will be recommending this read to my book club(s).

Thank you NetGalley and Random House/Hogarth for the eARC.

I love a long family saga! Beautiful writing and deep well developed characters. As I was reading this, it was long listed for the Booker prize and I’m not at all surprised by that. I can see many people enjoying this despite the length because of the extremely well developed characters and accurate portrayal of loneliness.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. Books like this are always ones I hold near my heart, where it shows complexity with emotions and the struggles of life. Sonia and Sunny’s characters were both amazing and as we learn more about each of them, their connection makes sense. They’re just two people trying to find happiness in a very complex world, and that is one of the most relatable themes in this story. The author shows how the themes of country, class, race, history, and generational bonds can burden the spirit. I clutched this one to my chest when I finished.

Nineteen years after The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker, Kiran Desai returns with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel that more than justifies its long gestation. Expansive in scope yet intimate in feeling, it examines migration, identity and belonging through the intertwined stories of two Indian protagonists caught between continents and expectations.

Sonia, after studying in the US, takes a job in an art gallery where her relationship with a charismatic artist destabilises her sense of self. Returning to India, she finds herself pulled in opposite directions by her parents while struggling to define her own identity. Sunny, meanwhile, works as a journalist in New York, restless and disillusioned, weighed down by the ambitions and sacrifices of his mother and the broader migrant community around him.

Their lives intersect when a marriage between them is proposed, yet Desai resists easy resolutions. What emerges instead is a sharp portrait of generational pressure, cultural dislocation, and the uneasy balance between duty and selfhood.

Desai’s prose is as assured as ever: lyrical but never indulgent, deeply empathetic without slipping into sentimentality. The novel’s six hundred pages flow with momentum, its characters’ anxieties amplified by themes that feel newly urgent—loneliness, disconnection, the search for belonging in a globalised world.

This is a book that lingers, one that asks difficult questions about identity and inheritance without offering neat answers. An ambitious, unsettling, and beautifully humane novel that confirms Desai’s place among the most vital contemporary writers.

Thanks to Penguin Books and NetGalley for the advance copy.

I would like to give this title 4 1/2 stars. It meandered at times, but most of the chapters were riveting. It's a family saga that had many components of a Dickens novel with intertwining plots and characters. Desai is a wonderful writer and the book felt very fresh and new; unlike many new titles. It was especially timely with themes of immigration and isolation and it would make a wonderful book discussion title for a book group not dissuaded by longer books. Highly recommended.

3.5, rounded down. #12 of the 2025 Booker longlist for me to have read.

First off, thanx to Netgalley, Random House/Hogarth and the author for the privilege of an ARC one month prior to publication.

First off, the positives: Desai certainly can write, and her prose is always a pleasure to read. Her characters are also quite well-defined and although sometimes bordering upon certain 'types' typical to South Asian literature, they can also be a lot of fun with which to spend time. Although the titular characters sometimes come off as rather bland, Sonia's father Manav/Papa and particularly Sunny's mother, Babita Bhatia are really wonderful creations, as are many of the subsidiary characters (the eBook does NOT contain the genealogical charts that the print copies have, which MIGHT have made the going a mite easier - but the Kindle search feature allowed me to backtrack when necessary to figure out who was who!).

What didn't work for me was the somewhat meandering storyline, which goes off on several different tangents, many of which didn't seem to connect either thematically or narratively to the main thread. At nearly 700 pages, I thought it could have used a lot of judicious pruning, and such jettisoning of the non-essentials would have made the remainder stronger.

But mostly I NEVER get along well with magical realism, and this contains a surfeit of such that I just couldn't really wrap my head around - so really a question of 'It's not you - it's me!' Still, I think this has a very good chance of making the shortlist and might even garner the author her second Booker in only three published works.

This was a sprawling 650-page book, one that I immediately wanted to read once I heard it was longlisted for this year's Booker Prize. The book felt especially timely with many of its themes: what it means to be an outsider, the performance of class, loneliness in various forms, and how immigrant identities about home and family change in their new country. The novel did slow a bit for me at times, but ultimately that's bound to happen in a book this long! While the story wandered a bit, it's clear the author is incredibly talented, especially in building these complex characters and using setting as its own sort of character. This was a powerful, raw and real read. Thank you NetGalley for the early digital copy.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai was an absolutely beautiful book. I love that it was a family saga and it pulled at your heart strings and left you wanting more. It's a slow paced book but it really does pay off by the end. There are no words to describe how much I loved reading this and I cannot wait to recommend this book to everyone.

This was a moving and complex book.
The characters were compelling.
I highly recommend this novel!

A saga - in terms of the story and in terms of reading 600+ pages. Detailed and interesting culturally, the story is still an investment to trudge through. Please read other reviews as perhaps my opinion doesn’t fully express the value of this story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this ARC.