The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
From Wikipedia
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Author Kiran Desai
Language English
Publisher Hogarth[1]
Publication date 2025
Publication place United States
Pages 688
Awards Booker Prize (shortlisted)
ISBN 9780307700155
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a 2025 novel by Kiran Desai. With the narrative taking place mostly between 1996 and 2002, the novel tells the story of Sonia and Sunny, both Indian immigrants to the United States, who have a chance encounter on a train in India. The meeting leads to a romance between the two young characters.
The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The judges described the novel as an epic of love and family, spanning generations and countries, that is the most "ambitious and accomplished" work by Desai.[2]
Narrative
Sonia is an aspiring novelist who has just completed her college studies in Vermont. She moves to New York City to be closer to her boyfriend, who is a much older accomplished artist. The relationship soon becomes dysfunctional and Sonia leaves him, returning to her family in India.
Sunny is a young journalist from New York City who works as a copy editor for the Associated Press. He has an American girlfriend. He moved to the United States to flee his overbearing mother. The two know of each other, as each of their grandparents had tried to arrange a marriage between them a few years earlier, believing both were single.
When Sunny travels back to India to visit his grandparents, he and Sonia meet on an overnight train and a budding relationship forms between them, which soon blossoms into a romance.
Title
Desai has said: "I wrote about the rifts between nations, between races, genders, religions, all as a kind of loneliness [...] But I was also interested in loneliness shifting shape into a quiet that is peace after the war is over. A sought-out solitude during a time of transformation. An exquisite artistic loneliness. A discovery of the dignity and privacy of one’s individual being."[3]
Reception
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, described the novel as Romeo and Juliet for the modern, globalized world. They also stated that the novel is narratively expansive, not just a romance or family saga, but exploring many other intriguing themes.[4]
Kirkus Reviews stated that the vignettes in the novel, of Sonia and Sonny, or of their family members, beautifully coalesce with the central themes of the work.[5]
Writing for The New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs stated that the novel was a meticulous, thorough work in a period of "hot takes and chilly optimized productivity". Jacobs also stated that Desai's inclusive attention to minor characters added richness to the work.[6]
Writing for The Guardian, Alex Clark stated that the novel intricately portrayed the complex, often contradictory internal ambitions and struggles of its characters against the backdrop of a rapidly changing modern India.[7]
The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.[8]
References
"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai: 9780307700155 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books". PenguinRandomhouse.com.
"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com. Booker Prizes. 25 September 2025.
"'I had a year to write it from scratch': the 2025 Booker finalists on the stories behind their novels". The Guardian. 8 November 2025. Retrieved 9 November 2025.
Szewczyk, Elaine (25 July 2025). "Kiran Desai's Labor of Love". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 3 September 2025.
"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny". Kirkusreviews.com. Kirkus. Retrieved 3 September 2025.
Jacobs, Alexandra. "Kiran Desai's Long-Awaited Return Is a Transcendent Triumph". Nytimes.com. New York Times.
Clark, Alex (9 September 2025). "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai review – a dazzling epic". Theguardian.com. The Guardian.
"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny". The Booker Prizes.
Categories: Novels about immigration to the United States
Family saga novels
Novels set in India
2025 novels
English-language novels
Novels set in the 1990s
Novels set in the 2000s
Novels set in New York City
Novels by Kiran Desai
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Kiran Desai’s Long-Awaited Return Is a Transcendent Triumph
Teeming with vivid characters across several continents, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” traces a hesitant romance that challenges tradition and loss.
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Credit...Haley Jiang
By Alexandra Jacobs
Published Sept. 14, 2025Updated Dec. 2, 2025
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THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY, by Kiran Desai
Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
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Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? Maybe with the idea of celebrity, which peaked in the late 1990s, when the book is largely set, and preoccupies several of its characters. Is being known widely an antidote to modern alienation — or its ultimate realization? Desai might have grappled herself with this question, as winner of the 2006 Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss”; this book is longlisted for the award (and if it’s not on the short list, to be announced Sept. 23, then the Bookerati have gone bonkers).
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“In this world you are famous or you are nobody,” declares Ilan de Toorjen Foss, the arrogant, aristocratic painter who seduces Sonia Shah, 32 years his junior, from Delhi and prone to melancholy. “Happiness,” an inner voice repeatedly tells her, “is for other people.”
This Book Is One of Our 10 Best of 2025. Let Us Show You Why.
Our critic A.O. Scott breaks down a scene from Kiran Desai’s lavish new novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.”
Sonia is a senior who works at the campus library at the fictional Hewitt College in Vermont (perhaps drawn from Bennington, where Desai studied; you can imagine Ilan, who learned the Highland fling at his Scottish boarding school and has family in Zurich, played by a middle-aged Max von Sydow).
Feeling “an almost unbearable, sublime tingle” reading “Anna Karenina,” she hopes to become such an author herself. “Ahhh — don’t write orientalist nonsense,” Ilan (the kind of jerk who underlines in library books) scoffs at her fledgling efforts. And: “Don’t write about arranged marriages.”
He goes full Pygmalion on Sonia: awakening her sexually, finding her a job with a glamorous but racist art gallerist in New York City, where he has an apartment, buying her beautiful clothes at Bergdorf Goodman, letting her move in and putting her in charge of the groceries and his brittle ego.
There are enough billowing red flags in this relationship for a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation — pistachio shells and lentil soup pitched out the window, superstition, temperature sensitivity, germophobia, thievery, demeaning rages.
But Sonia, enraptured, remains as muse through Ilan’s first big success even as he proves to be a narcissistic abuser with major mommy issues. When their ménage comes to an abrupt if predictable ending, she accidentally leaves behind an amulet that had belonged to her late German grandfather, also a painter.
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Oblivious to all of this, her parents in Delhi have been drifting apart as her mother discovers herself professionally, and her other grandfather has been scheming to betroth Sonia to the grandson of his chess partner, in part to settle a long-ago debt. Defying her villain’s edicts, Desai will be writing about arranged marriages, and even throw in a little magical realism, but in a thoroughly unpredictable way that ingeniously incorporates his celebrated canvases, and the way Sonia is portrayed in them.
The young man haphazardly intended for her is Sunny Bhatia, a copy editor on the night shift for The Associated Press who was drawn to America after reading about its eccentrics in J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut.
Sunny lives with some unease in the gentrified Fort Greene neighborhood, “this Brooklyn idyll of triumphant multiracial calm.” Unbeknown to his widowed, class-obsessed mother, he’s sharing an apartment with Ulla, the daughter of Republicans from Prairie Hill, Kan., who have issues of Consumer Reports by their recliner and five guns in the basement.
Shaky in his status as a “person of color” in a nation obsessed with “race, race, race,” he too weighs the price of fame, interviewing a railroad clerk who has grown fingernails long enough to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records. His subject’s outrage at the resultant story foreshadows a climactic confrontation to come.
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Kiran Desai’s new novel is on the Booker Prize longlist.Credit...Meghan Marin for The New York TimesOne of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters — far too many to detail here, and not all animate. Beyond the “Upstairs, Downstairs” of 19th-century fiction, yet with comparable heft, she ventures into the floorboards, up into the trees and across time zones. (In a narrative coup, 9/11 is witnessed from Mexico.)
A divorced, wart-nosed aunt rubs her hairy legs together in bed, self-soothing. A chauffeur delays Sonia and Sunny’s first important date because he is collecting discarded plastic bags along the road. One even comes to feel affection for the Shah family car, “the Ambassador, its rotundity washed as lovingly as a buffalo.”
And the actual animals! The small squid clinging helplessly to a net in Venice during a tourist expedition; bandicoots ravaging the kitchen and even stealing soap; pigeons copulating on the air-conditioner — all stay in the imagination. Even the house cat and dog get a place in the family tree.
Crowded but never claustrophobic, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.
THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY | By Kiran Desai | Hogarth | 688 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
A version of this article appears i
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'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is a terrific, tangled love story
October 3, 202510:22 AM ET
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Transcript
Hogarth
It took Kiran Desai nearly 20 years to write her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. I mean this as a sincere tribute when I say I'm amazed it only took her that long.
Desai's near 700-page novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is about exile and displacement — not only from one's home country, family and culture, but also from one's own sense of self. The multi-character, multi-stranded plot roams from locales in India and the U.S. — Delhi, Goa, Vermont, Brooklyn — with side trips to Italy and Mexico.
This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed.
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There are plenty of complications, however, before and after that fateful moment. When the novel opens in the late 1990s, Sonia is a depressed college student in Vermont, who hasn't been back to India in two years. Her grandparents, her lifeline back home, are baffled. Here's a sampling of a phone conversation a tearful Sonia has with her grandfather:
"[W]hat are you crying for, you lucky girl?”
Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse —”
“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books.”
The miscommunication there is generational, cultural and temperamental; tragically, it makes the isolated Sonia ripe for the picking by a visiting art monster — a painter named Ilan.
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Early in their affair, Ilan boasts to the impressionable Sonia: "[M]aybe I will paint a picture that the whole world will know and you'll become angry and feel you don't exist outside the painting." And, he does just that, appropriating her body and an intimate moment of shame in his art for all to see.
Just as damaging is Ilan's theft of a treasured amulet that Sonia inherited from her German grandfather. Without that amulet, depicting a demon protector, Sonia feels bereft.
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But, what of Sunny, our other protagonist here? He, too, has left India for the U.S. where we first meet him, working for the Associated Press. A prime motivation for Sunny's move was his domineering mother, Babita; we're told "[Sunny] had thought he would be able to love her better from New York."
Instead, Sunny finds himself editing his life for his mother; for instance, hiding the existence of his live-in girlfriend — a Nordic Midwesterner named Ulla. In one of the many black comedy set pieces in this novel, Ulla takes Sunny home to Kansas to meet her folks. Here are some snippets from that visit, mostly seen from Ulla's anxious perspective:
[Ulla] didn’t want Sunny to find her father’s Consumer Reports in the basket by his reclining chair. She didn’t want her father to tell Sunny he’d found an excellent deal on his own tombstone. ...
Ulla had told Sunny he was not to say anything complimentary about socialism or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton. ...
Ulla, vigilant to both sides, saw that Sunny was not able to perform to his eccentric self, that her parents’ bawdy humor was oppressed. ... They passed the beans and the corn bread. The ticktock asserted itself while her mother wondered if it was safe to say she had enjoyed the movie Gandhi. Maybe “enjoyed” was not the word.
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What hope is there for us to understand each other, let alone ourselves, when so much of human interaction is performance? Sonia, a writer, considers that question as it applies to art, recognizing the danger of packaging an "exotic" India in her writing for the "enticement of white people." "Would the dilemma vanish [Sonia wonders] if the abundance of stories grew as abundant as life itself?"
In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai has come close to achieving that ideal. This is a spectacular novel — nearly "as abundant as life itself" — to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel Hardcover – September 23, 2025
by Kiran Desai (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars (1,483)
3.9 on Goodreads
5,971 ratings
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF PEOPLE’S TOP 5 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST
KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus Reviews, Elle, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library, Lit Hub
ONE OF BOOKPAGE’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
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From the United States
Englishteacher
5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't stop reading this book. Read it into the wee hours of the night.
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I could not put down this book! It is magical. The intricate prose style is lyrical. The characters are subtle and real. The themes intertwine naturally with the plot and make the reader think while simultaneously feeling for the characters. At its heart, this novel is a love story--of family, of culture, of self, and romantic love that has room for the other loves.
15 people found this helpful
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helloitsme
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, too many words
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2025
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This book was very well written and goes in to great depth as to culture, generational trauma, immigrants who do not feel at home in their new or home country, religions, class divisions, corruption, superstitions, expectations, and more. It was way too long however. I grazed over paragraphs and pages because it included many more words than were necessary and a reader could easily lose interest. If this book were whittled down to a third of the words that seemed redundant and not necessary, this book would have been perfect.
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Sushi
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2025
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I absolutely loved Sonia & Sunny. I believe it is not really about a person, but about fear, loneliness, and the long, uncertain journey through life. In a time when loneliness has reached epidemic proportions, the book captures how people remain isolated even within love, family, and success.
For me, the novel’s strength lies in its emotional depth, lyrical prose, and fearless ambition. It is sprawling, yes, and perhaps could have benefited from a slightly firmer editorial hand — but it remains a masterpiece nonetheless. Sonia & Sunny is a luminous reflection on how solitude shapes identity, and how, in seeking connection, we uncover our truest selves. It gets my wholehearted vote for the Booker Prize.
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Dave's Take
3.0 out of 5 stars Great writing that veers badly off course
Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2025
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Like so many I waited for this book. At times, she is so wildly precise, about love, and India, and the relationships we value and why. But the book loses the plot, and is badly in need of honest editing. Over 100 pages are dedicated to rehashing Fanon/Said post-colonial theory with nothing new to say at all. When it veers into the effects on the writer, and what kind of stories to tell, it came close to revealing some new side, like whether magical realism is contained in an expectation of Indian writers, but ultimately it says very little. And then the turn into magical realism in the later end of the book, with nothing earlier to offer us entry into that world, just falls flat instead of soaring. You know you are reading from a wondrous author, and someone is spoiling it with the need to resonate with other academics with the same polemics.
13 people found this helpful
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Judith Woodfin
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant saga of families, love and lovers in changing times,
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2025
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This is a book to dive into and love every word and all of the well drawn characters. I am not finished reading the book. It is long and should be read slowly.
7 people found this helpful
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sgl
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2025
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Shortlisted for 2025’s Booker Prize, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny written by Kiran Desai has garnered many enticing adjectives in praise of her book: lavish, smart, magnificent, spellbinding, transcendent, lyrical…and nouns like literary achievement, a marvel, an epic.
Already a huge fan of Abraham Verghese’s epic, A Covenant of Water (a book held up as a comparison), in which we’re plunged into the lives of Indians on their journeys hoping to find love and purpose, I may have, through some reviewer’s comments, inadvertently, generated unfair expectations…not a mindset I recommend.
Because of my deep interest in humanity, perhaps influenced by my years coaching clients who want dating and relationship advice, I couldn’t control my innate tendencies to dissect relationships, ferociously wanting to jump in and encourage better, more honest ways of communicating.
And isn’t that a compliment to the author? I was deeply invested in many characters’ futures.
There are many introduced to us (made somewhat easier to remember by viewing the attached pdf of two family trees, available to purchasers of the book), and instead of feeling weary from the weight, I settled in, realizing I must not, if I really want to experience this book, skip ahead to see if my predictions come true. (Ooooh, I’m restraining myself from revealing if they did.)
The prose is quite beautiful, perhaps coming in second though if compared to the Verghese book, and still, I felt some impatience for the end to draw near….and then, as it approached, I found myself wanting a bit more. And after that? It ended as it should have.
(If you prefer to listen, the audio by Sneha Mathan is excellent.)
6 people found this helpful
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MPSCustomer
5.0 out of 5 stars A long and satisfying journey
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2025
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This book contains humanity in a nutshell. Love, families, trauma, religion, magic, sex, politics, art, culture, class. The writing is sublime, the narrative flawless. A global perspective. Masterpiece.
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Adrienne
5.0 out of 5 stars Transcendent
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2025
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This is more than a mere novel, it’s a work of art. Desi transported me back in time to my city of New York as well as cities I have visited— like Delhi and Goa, as well as places I’ve never been. Her prose is so vivid, her imagery and emotional depictions a tour de force. These characters will surely stay with me forever.
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Mysterygirl
4.0 out of 5 stars Comedy or contempt? I dunno...
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2025
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I'm puzzled by the tone of this book. Sunny and Sonja are fully developed, complex characters that captured my interest. Both have come to the United States for schooling and careers; both are ambivalent about their homeland, families and life in the US. In particular, the section of the book describing Sonia's relationship with an abusive partner was compelling and very realistic. Sonja and Sunny are thrown together through a period of years but some problem always arises that breaks them up. Often, these problems stem from their own conflicted feelings and experiences as people who no longer fully fit into their homeland, and are not yet entirely comfortable in the US. But they're clearly meant for each other and I was definitely rooting for them.
But most of the other secondary characters, particularly those from India, are one dimensional caricatures, almost cartoons. In part, it's because the omniscient narrator has a dryly humorous, detached voice. I think these characters are supposed to be comical but it comes off as faintly contemptuous to my Western ear. Honestly, if it was authored by a non-Indian, we would definitely find this book to be offensive. It made me wonder if this book is really written for a non-Western audience, for whom these characters would be tropes who are very recognizable, beloved and affectionately embraced.
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Jim Macdonald
4.0 out of 5 stars Magical? sure! but also funny and wise!
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
The only imperfection in this otherwise marvelous book is that at 670 pages it is at least 100 pages too long. We read and listened to the Audible, which is itself wonderful. I found certain chapters incredibly funny and wise in a way Kurt Vonnegut would loved. If you are browsing this book in hard copy please read Chapter 15 What Solace Is That? At 483 to 511. I can’t stop laughing (especially at 491 and the “hell hath no fury line” at the bottom of 511). Please check it out.
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