BookBrowse Reviews The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

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Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai returns almost twenty years later with a triumphant exploration of love and family.

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Kiran Desai's third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, opens with a phone call. In India, Manav has just heard from his daughter Sonia, who is in her last year of college at a small school in Vermont. "She weeps on the telephone," he tells his parents. "She says she's lonely." Sonia's grandparents don't understand this particular type of loneliness—"they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown"—but they nevertheless set out to rectify the situation. Her grandfather plays chess with a man called the Colonel, whose grandson Sunny is also in America, and he asks the Colonel to arrange a marriage between the two young people. Unbeknownst to their relatives, however, Sonia has begun a relationship with an emotionally abusive, narcissistic artist 30 years her senior, while Sunny is living in New York City with a beautiful woman from Kansas. Neither takes the proposed arrangement seriously.

Several months later, Sonia and Sunny are both single and have returned to India. They meet randomly on a train, unaware that their families know each other and that they'd been intended to become husband and wife. They're immediately attracted to one another and begin an on-again, off-again relationship, until they finally break up to focus on their careers. Sunny, who wishes to become a journalist, wins a PEN grant and travels to Mexico to find inspiration for his next essay; Sonia, stuck in India due to an expired visa, aspires to write fiction but becomes overwhelmed by the challenge. "I feel I am circling the story," she says to a new acquaintance. "I see a glimpse here and there, like a fin, a ripple, but I can't see the whole beast." As each of them pursues the life they think they want, they're distracted by their longing for the other, far away, and ultimately realize they must be together to be happy.

In many ways, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has the form of a conventional love story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. But no novel by Kiran Desai, whose second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, could ever be that simple. (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has already been longlisted for the 2025 Booker.) Entertaining subplots weave their way throughout the narrative, many of them portraying different types of loneliness: Sonia's parents are in a loveless marriage in which both feel isolated; Sunny's mother speaks constantly to her dead husband (whom she despised), and fears her son will abandon her if he weds; Sunny's best friend feels so alone that he has a marriage arranged for him, only to find he's just as lonely with this stranger who has become his spouse.

Desai is also interested in the Westernization of the younger generation in some Indian families. "[T]here were no children in India anymore in the homes of successful parents of a successful class," she writes. "They were at Harvard, Oxford, Siemens…Microsoft…the World Bank." Sunny resents his mother for "bringing him up in such a Westernized manner that he'd always be a foreigner in his own country," and although as a child he'd been proud of "being so Westernized that he couldn't speak his own language," his "wobbly Hindustani" has become both a hindrance and an embarrassment. The novel grapples with racism, classism, and cultural and generational differences, among other themes.

One might think that a 700-page novel about such heavy topics might drag, but The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is so beautifully written that each page is a treat to read. Desai's writing is vivid and lush, as when she describes that "the riverbank burbled and popped with mudskippers and crabs…[Sunny's mother] watched the sky-blue ferry strung festively with orange life rings move slowly across the sleepy, brown spread of river." At another point, poignantly, she writes that "without him, [Sonia] was as lonesome as a book nobody has read for three hundred years."

The novel's pace is also helped by the omniscient narrator, who observes the foibles of her subjects with subtle humor:

"Ulla was the girlfriend Sunny had never happened to mention to his family, although for over a year now, they had shared a lease, a bed, a Con Ed utility bill, a laundry basket, and on some absentminded occasions, a toothbrush."

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny comes nineteen years after The Inheritance of Loss, and this remarkable novel was well worth the wait. Desai's rich descriptions and her entertaining narration will delight readers of literary fiction.

This review first ran in the September 24, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.