'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is a glorious, sweeping love story following the lives of two Indian young people in both India and America. When the novel starts, both Sonia and Sunny are in America - Sonia as a student in Vermont, where she begins a toxic and all-consuming relationship with Ilan, an older artist, and Sunny as a budding journalist in New York, where he lives with his midwestern girlfriend Ulla. Back in India, Sonia's grandparents, hearing of Sonia's loneliness (an alien concept to them), attempt to broker an arranged marriage through Sunny's grandparents; this is quickly rebuffed without Sonia and Sunny ever meeting, but it sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually bring them together.

Kiran Desai paints on a vast canvas: as well as Sunny and Sonia's own adventures together and apart, we follow the lives of their parents and grandparents (as well as Sonia's aunt, divorced after six months of marriage who continues to live with her parents into her fifties). These are all immensely complex and compelling characters, and through their stories, Desai is able to explore changing attitudes towards family, relationships and national identity between different generations with tremendous insight and nuance. Art and language also play a prominent role in the novel, through Ilan's paintings and Sunny and Sonia's writing.

Prior to its publication, this novel has already been deservedly longlisted for the Booker Prize: as well as being a brilliant read, it is a major work of postcolonial fiction that deserves serious recognition and critical attention. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

And in fact very deliberately my last pre longlist announcement read as from early reviews of this novel - the first by the author since her 2006 Booker Prize winning second novel “The Inheritance of Loss” (which defeated Edward St Aubyn’s “Mothers Milk” 4-1 in the final vote despite an attempt by the 1 – Anthony Quinn to demand a recount) and some twenty years in the writing – I felt it had an excellent chance to make the list.

Appropriately a character in another 2025 Booker longlisted novel – Tom the narrator of “The Rest of Our Lives” provides what could be a coda to this novel: Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations

It is by far the longest book on the longlist (as a character observes "This was India, she thought. You might try to write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one. The sense could never be contained.") weighing in at over 650 pages – but was actually carved out of a much longer set of writing. As far back as 2019 Desai said in an interview (which is both in title and themes very recognisably what we are reading now)

"I've been working on a book forever. See, if I was in a writing workshop, quite likely l'd be finished. But instead I've taken a long time to explore a multitude of stories and now I will whittle it down and whittle it down and distill it. I'm working on a book called The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny and it's a book about global loneliness, the division between nations, the division between classes, the division between races, the fact that the past is vanishing so fast—many kinds of loneliness, not just romantic, but the novel seen through the lens of an endlessly unresolved romance."

I would probably go further and say that the novel has two complex relationships.

Yes the “endlessly unresolved romance” between Sonia and Sunny which plays out against complex family relationships, the two family trees of the characters that start the book are a useful guide to navigating it but the cast of key characters is much lighter than the length may suggest – but also and equally difficult to navigate for the two titular NRIs, not just between home and adopted country but very specifically America and India – with just like any relationship each party bringing its own flaws and faults and misunderstanding those of the other.

Sonia at the novel’s start is studying at college in Vermont and thinking about fiction writing (although in a clear metafictional nod subject to her own and other’s doubts about what is appropriate to include in Indian fiction for an American audience) – and initially clearly lonely causing her grandparents to decide to try for an arranged introduction into Sunny the son of a family who owe something of a non-fiscal debt to them.

Sonia though falls into a fairly toxic relationship with an older, charismatic and fairly-famous older artist (and it seems serial seducer) Ivan – a character who I have to say I initially hoped was simply a cameo leading into her later life but becomes something of a permanent shadow on both her and for some time my enjoyment of the novel, before I realised that I too needed to re-adjust my expectations of the Indian author I was reading and that she was really examining much of the same ideas of the patriarchal gaze (and behaviour) in art as Rachel Cusk explores in “Parade” with an increasingly strong element of the menacing fantastical imagery (in particular a painting of a dog which seems to blend into the real world) which reminded me of the writing of Deborah Levy. When that relationship first fails she returns to India.

Sunny – a budding AP journalist - meanwhile is in a kept-secret-from his overbearing mother live-in relationship with a white American girl, a relationship which rather drifts and which he escapes when he travels back to India with an NRI friend who has decided to look for an arranged marriage.

And both are then drawn – in a novel set roughly over the 1996-2002 period - back to the very past and family they had partially gone to America to escape – with Sunny’s mother Babita, and Sonia’s separate-during-the-novel parents Seher and Manav, all experiencing their own loneliness in this sweeping tale.

Although Sunny moves to Mexico (a deliberate nod I am sure to the magic realism that from then on pervades the novel).

Through this tale of generational/country/race/class/caste/male-female complexities and how they play out into the isolation of the modern world there are also running themes of privilege and representation in art and no-holds-barred critiques of both the US and India but particularly in terms of fiction.

This is currently due to be published in the US on the day of the Booker shortlist announcement, and in the UK 2 days after I would be surprised if it does not lead to a double shortlisting for the author (still one short of her mother Anita’s three Booker shortlistings) and this must be a contender for the win given the judges comments that it is “the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our great novelists” – and not, from a first read, a winner with which I would quibble.

This was special, an epic exploration of what it feels like to live in modern times.

One of the many themes is the titular loneliness. We tend to think of this as what happens when we either spend too long alone or being surrounded by people by with no one to connect to. This also considers if spending too much time with one person who is entranced by the idea of a person instead of the real person can also be a cause. This could be within families where you permanent bachelors or spinsters due to their relationship with their parents, or through toxic relationships where a man treats girlfriends as essential then disposable. Kiran interestingly considers the impacts of these dynamics on all parties making it much more complex than most novels.

Another theme is how much we are allowed to care varies by power dynamics. Class, race, age and many other lenses are used to show this. Everyone is expected to be aware of 9/11 and the implications of it, but a natural disaster on the Ganges can split past people even if it’s much closer to home and had direct repercussions on their lives. We spend pivotal sections in Goa which we represents the past of the Eastern world as well as Rome representing the past of the Western world and the reactions from the wide cast of characters paint very different views of how important that history is.

We have so much information at our fingertips today we have to sort things into categories to make it manageable but this book pushes back against this idea and refuses to fit neatly into any genre. This could be a romance, a campus novel, a family saga, a novel of ideas, magical realism or many other subcategories but it transcends them all. Who is the creator of art, the artist or the audience and does the distinction matter?

This is also a beautifully written novel and very funny in parts. I expect this to be one of the best books I’ll read this year.