After breaking records and receiving widespread acclaim for her 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai took her time. The Booker Prize-winning author spent the next nineteen years crafting the kind of novel you would expect after such a hiatus, the giant sweeping saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Following the two titular characters, who are disaffected youth caught between cultures and countries, the novel explores not only loneliness on a personal level, but on a broad societal level. Bold, meandering, and frequently melodramatic, Sonia and Sunny is certainly unique, but does not always deliver on consistency.
Sonia is a college graduate reeling from a bad breakup with an older, predatory artist. Sunny is an immigrant journalist who tries to reconcile his Indian identity with his American comfort. Their meddling, messy families complicate what could be a budding love story, and due to competing egos and past hangups, Sonia and Sunny must figure out their own paths before beginning one together. The book has everything from meditations on art and belonging to untimely crime to soul-sucking parent-child relationships. There are thieving animals and spinster aunts, Goan beaches and Vermont snows. To describe this novel requires listing these disparate elements and letting the prose do the work in bridging them together. It is a masterclass in contradictions.
Sonia proclaims midway through the novel “I hate scenes! I hate melodrama!” followed by the plain prose “She made a scene. She made a melodrama.” This encompasses the plot movement of the novel, characters frequently acting against their best interest and seemingly unaware of their shortcomings, while the narrator reminds us that those shortcomings painfully exist. This distance between storyteller and actors creates much-needed distance, allowing us to observe these histrionics rather than immerse ourselves in them. Sonia’s narrative struggle is developing a sense of self, which has been irrevocably stunted by spending months of her life in an abusive relationship. Coming out of her own depression and malaise, she frequently spurns attempts of help and kindness in favor of her own misery. She is hard to love but easy to understand. Desai does not shy away from Sonia’s faults even if Sonia herself is loathe to accept them.
Sunny, while less personally engaging than Sonia, exemplifies some of the strongest philosophical musings of the novel, which is describing and expanding upon the precise loneliness of South Asians in the broader world, especially during the shift from pre-9/11 to post. In America, where racial conversations largely concerned a Black and White dichotomy, Sunny struggles to belong and identify who he aligns with. He feels more at home among other people of color, but also recognizes social stratification and the dominance of White culture. Post 9/11 he is suddenly visible, a fearful target, and this adds a dark undertone to his frequent internal reminder: “don’t be three South Asians. Don’t be two South Asians.” This complex relationship, as well as a dynamic with his mother best described as emotional incest, almost dooms Sunny to unhappiness. In Sonia he finds someone equally lonely, albeit differently.
While the titular characters are nuanced and well thought out, the serial-like mannerisms of the supporting cast is at times painful to read. From Sonia’s father’s helplessness to Sunny’s mother’s insistence on provincial White manners, they serve as necessary deterrents to our main characters’ happiness, but also dominate large portions of the narrative. Succinctly put, they are tiresome to read and in a tome such as this one, nearly 700 pages, the mind looks for places to scale back.
Other aspects of the novel are not necessarily flaws. Sonia and Sunny is slow paced and does not contain the expected narrative beats of a romance, but that is because its scope is much broader and less tangible. Pages and pages of the novel are devoted to lush, immersive descriptions of Delhi and Goa and New York City, which can distract some readers but serves to create an almost fantastical environment. The prose, although dense, elevates the personal struggles of our titular characters to mythic proportions. Sonia and Sunny are not just lost youth of the early 2000s, struggling to find personal fulfillment in a rapidly changing world, they are also hero and heroine of a tragicomic epic.
The question of a novel like this inevitably comes down to length, but to shorten Sonia and Sunny would be to create an entirely different novel. This may have allowed for greater narrative focus, but in the process would omit some of the strongest aspects of the book, that being the incisive, complex commentary on Indian society and the Indian diaspora. Casteism, class conflict, colonialism, gender dynamics, and parent-child relationships are all on full display, and no generational figure is spared. Even some of the most tragic characters, such as Sonia’s spinster aunt Mina Foi, are reduced to helpless farces at times. For those in the South Asian community searching for frequently frustrating yet relatable characters, one cannot go wrong with this novel. The distance of the narrator and the ability to inhabit numerous perspectives lets us engage in this melodrama, and even the downright silliness, at our leisure.
As a whole, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a monumental feat and stands apart as a work on its own and from the other inclusions on this year’s Booker longlist, a relatively sparse baker’s dozen with several novels clocking at under 200 pages. Sonia and Sunny hearkens back to an earlier time, engaging in somewhat dated prose excess, to fascinating results.
FICTION
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
By Kiran Desai
Hogarth
Published September 23, 2025
