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.

First off a big thank you to Random House and Net Galley for the ARC. Right after I received it, the book was long listed for the Booker Prize so whoa! I’m super grateful to get to read it before its release day of 9/23/25.

This book definitely fits the description of an epic family saga - two families actually - which are some of my absolute favorites. Sonia and Sunny are both Indian expats living in the US. While they don’t know each other, their families back in India do.

I don’t want to give too much of the story away, but the book really explores the ideas of love and relationships and how the baggage we bring to them affects everything. There aren’t a lot of good examples of loving relationships for Sonia and Sunny - both in their families’ pasts and their own personal histories. This book is mainly about the way they navigate through it all.

I loved the way the author uses setting in this story. We travel all over and each place is important in its own right and in the story. I loved the use of the sea and swimming and how it keeps coming back. I loved the magical realism and totems that appear in the book. I appreciated the importance of the superstitions and totems to the characters. I loved the ideas about writing, as Sonia and Sunny are both writers, .

This book was a slow read for me, and a lot of the time I felt intimidated. I saw a bunch of reviews and that made me feel like I wasn’t really getting all I should be out of it? Which I know is dumb but still. It wasn’t a book I tore through. And it’s long, at like 650+ pages. But In very glad to have read it and I was absolutely satisfied and happy about the ending, which made it all worth it.

I give this 4.25 stars.

Thanks again to Random House and Net Galley.

I’m adding my name to the chorus of admiration that is surely about to descend on this wonderful novel. What a vast, wise, comic, clever, intricate and compelling work it is, 20 years in the writing and all the better for that accumulation of time and application. It’s a romance yes, but much more than that, spanning generations, continents, modern attitudes versus traditional ones, ideas, philosophies, spirituality - I could go on. But it’s also light of spirit and heart, serious but playful and full of images and ideas. Characters are careful and complex. Topics are grave - death, sexism - and real. It creates its own world and allows the reader privileged entrance into it. I was delighted, and grateful.

This is one of those books that is difficult to review not because of traumatic subject matter but because how can one possibly convey 688 pages into a simple review? It is also the kind of book that at first seems too long, and probably is, and covers a large cast of characters, not just a love story across time and place between two people. This is more of a sweeping, literary, family saga than a pure romance, so this book won't appeal to everyone.

I loved The Inheritance of Loss so I was thrilled to get approved for this ARC, and for once one of my highly anticipated reads was worth the expectations I placed on it. It was also worth the investment in time and not just long for the sake of congratulating yourself for having accomplished reading a chonker. There were parts where it dragged and when it went into unneccessary detail about their family members, and these could often seem like unlikable rich people, but for the most part, I was mesmerized and felt like I was inserted into their family life. I don't mind unlikable if characters are also complex and have other likable qualities. I found myself not wanting it to end.

At times this book tried to cover too much and too aware of itself as it used the love story between Sunny and Sonia as a metaphor for Indian independence and the displaced identities of immigrants, but then it grounded itself in everyday, intimate details like their families' fight over Sonia's parents' cook's wonderful kebabs, that in turn ended up being one of several statement pieces that tied the whole room together.

Marriage and love when it is most lasting is about the blending of two families and all their struggles and joys, and that's what this epic love story strove for. At times it seemed to focus more on their families, careers and other relationships than their romance. But it took the thesis that love is being seen, being known, and part of to know someone is to understand what drives them, where they come from, how they were raised, their dreams. It covered that in sweeping, immersive detail.

As Sunny stays in New York, filled with self-loathing and wanting to be an American so desperately, he has an American girlfriend for a status symbol and pursues a reporting career for the Associated Press. Sonia, also in New York, is terribly lonely, and their families set them up with an introduction. She wants to be a writer, but instead she becomes trapped in an abusive relationship with a mad painter who steals her grandfather's sacred amulet. The amulet, like the kebabs, ties the whole epic together. She escapes home to India to look after her father, where she feels more alone, and chased by the demons of her lost amulet.

Sunny and Sonia meet from time to time, separate from time to time, finding a simple love on vacation in Italy, then they lose it from time to time until destiny brings them back together. But this felt like an epic love story that involves great risk and sacrifice more than a situationship. This book made me smile, cry, root for them and fall in love with them even when I found them unbearably selfish and shallow at times. When they were together, the intimacy between them made me see them for who they were.

They also felt like metaphors for young Indians trying to make their way in the modern world, caught between displacement and suffocation, history and the future, freedom and oppression.

This beautiful epic will stay in my mind and my heart for a long time.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Whew! This is a very complex and long story, the kind that needs to be reread to understand all the meaning, themes and symbolism. I think I highlighted more than half the book. I can definitely see why this is long listed for the Booker.

This book is a meditation on displacement, immigration and identity. Sonia, is a young woman from India studying in Vermont. She is torn between expectations and the reality of her situation. She wants to be an author, but she misses home and is struggling to adapt. Sunny, also from India, is a New York based journalist, who navigates a different but parallel situation. Both are restless.

This story is full of juxtaposition and satire in its examination of Indian culture and the diaspora. Indian values of tradition, family expectation, and societal norms are discussed alongside American values of individualism, freedom, and modernity.

While the title hints at loneliness and indeed, Sonia and Sunny do struggle with it, this story is ultimately more about belonging. 4.25 stars

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Hogarth for the ARC.