Kiran Desai’s new novel has been ten years in the making. “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, and is the successor to her Booker Prize-winning novel, “The Inheritance of Loss.” Both novels examine what it means to be a displaced individual in the wake of colonialism and globalisation. Kiran’s principal characters are Indians in the process of situating themselves in the world. They yearn for a place that will accept them for who they are, only to discover that such a place is a curse, or at best, a fable. “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” covers big ground. It tells the story of a less than perfect love, and all the people who come into the lovers’ lives. The novel moves between Allahabad, Vermont, New York, Delhi, Goa, Mexico, and Italy. We are given stories within stories, an endless mirror of reflections and narratives. The specificity of Kiran’s imagined world makes the stories ever the more universal, as all great works of literature tend to do. There are invocations of history, politics, and sociology. The result is a rich reading experience, one that is immersive and expansive, every chapter propelling the reader forward, hungering for what follows.
Sonia, a graduate student in Vermont is a source of worry for her grandparents in Allahabad and her parents in New Delhi. To cure her melancholia on an empty campus during the winter holidays, she becomes romantically involved with a much older and wealthy American painter, Ilan, who is on the brink of fame. Sunny is living in New York with his American girlfriend, frustrated with the slow pace of his very serious writing career. Sonia and Sunny’s families attempt to bring them together through a marriage proposal that originates from settling an old inter-familial score. They slowly make their way to each other over time and geographies. The novel brings to mind the folkloric storytelling of Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry, and is in the vein of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” which it often references.
“For half of the ten years, I was creating a lot of the material,” Kiran says when asked about how the ten years appear in retrospect, “not necessarily for this book, but keeping journals, following my thoughts, following different story lines. My journals and the beginnings of this book are the same. Diaries that I kept when travelling and the origins of the book are the same. I was coming across ideas and thoughts, and kept the habit of working daily. Then at a certain point, I wrote the train scene in which Sonia and Sunny meet. With that came the idea of writing about globalness through the lens of a love story. Once I had the title, which probably came halfway through the ten years, it allowed me to focus the novel on Sonia and Sunny. I think I last edited the book at the end of June. I was still working on the novel then.”
The novel is as much about Sonia and Sunny as it is about its peripheral characters. Sonia’s Dadaji is a retired military colonel who huffs orders in a formal English to his judgemental and very co-dependent wife. Sonia’s aunt, Mina Foi, has given up all hope for herself, being single and in her fifties, a fate she attributes to the controlling nature of her parents. Sonia’s mother is unhappy with her father who is trying his best to stop her from slipping through his fingers. Meanwhile Sunny’s mother, Babita, is boisterous and controlling in her own way. With a close third point of view of narration, Kiran allows these characters to tell their stories so that we get to know them deeply. Through them we understand the world of societal restrictions that moulds Sunny and Sonia. And yet despite this complex social system, no character is immune to loneliness.
“It was a lot of following tangents,” says Kiran about the genesis of the book, “I wanted this to be a story that included a large cast of characters. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, friends. I was interested in how their stories influence Sunny and Sonia’s stories, their political stories and personal ones. I wanted to create a lexicon of global loneliness, of different stories and different versions and different aspects of loneliness. I had this idea, you know, that I could go on forever. And I suppose I did,” she says, “I probably did exactly what I tell my students not to do which is that you can’t write every story in the world, but I was sort of writing every story in the world.”
“At a certain point, I read through my entire manuscript which was a huge pile of paper, and then worked to lift the story out. Then there were a lot of editing years. Years of jig sawing the different stories together, cutting appropriately, finding where stories could coincide. Of course, every time you make a change, you have to go back and redo the whole thing. Everything has to settle into a new shape and a new rhythm. I still don’t know if I got it right, you know, this is one version of the book.”
Kiran describes her daily life during the ten years as stable and disciplined. She would spend time at her desk writing all day, every day. She says she wouldn’t have known what to do with herself had she not been writing. She admits that it takes psychological stamina and faith to keep going and to not panic. She kept trusting somehow that there was something larger she was working towards. The moments of doubt were familiar from her previous books, she knew there was “always the next day, or that this was a bad time, then the mood might shift as things shift, and there may be clarity to be found if you kept working.”
Keeping within the realm of craft, an impressive feat of the book is its even pacing throughout. The close third person point of view allows her to dip into just enough interiority and then jump to cover some big story arcs and dense exposition. The book is sectioned into parts which then consist of numerous short chapters. “It is secretly structured according to who is caught by whose gaze. The underlying themes and ideas provide the structure to the book. I do know from writing “The Inheritance of Loss” that if you’re writing a large cast of characters, a short chapter is very helpful, because you need to move between people and places without losing any of the stories, especially if you’re moving across time. If you’re trying to make parallels between different historical times, then you also need to move swiftly between the different time periods. You have to keep all the balls juggling, and a reader can’t forget any of the characters.”
A book of this length with a host of characters and multiple story lines, is a challenge to say the least. “I certainly struggled because the novel is so complex, and I was following the shadow world in a way too. The deeper themes of the book had to work in the clear light of day, just like the events, the time, seasons, years, all of the different things had to fit together. I struggled with it.”
The book seems to have led Kiran to itself. This is a book derived from her own intuition. The form, she thinks is a direct result of this intuition. “The novel dictates its own form. It tells you what you have to do. Quite often, this book took me to places that I didn’t want to go. It’s a very realistic book and yet there’s also an esoteric strain in it, the sense of the unseen world. I didn’t expect that. I felt as if I kind of had to do it. That was interesting to me.” She is referring to the spiritual guidance provided to Sonia by a Tibetan heirloom, Cloud Baba, passed down to her by her mysterious German grandfather, a grandfather who in many ways bears resemblance to Kiran’s own German grandmother. The length of the book mostly owes itself to decisions of form but readers seem to be leaning towards longer books these days if sales and prize nominees are to be considered. “I remember when Covid happened, people started baking bread and staying home. I think people indulged in art then in a completely different way, and a lot of writers wrote long books during Covid. Those years, I have to say, were not much different from my normal life. I was still working in the same way. But I know a lot of authors that wrote long books. I’m thinking of writers who write within the Indian landscape. Like Abraham Verghese who wrote ‘The Covenant of Water’.”
“There are certain things you can do with a long book that you just cannot do in a short book, and vice versa. So, but this was my long book, I can’t do it again. I’m 54 years old, I can’t write a book like this again. I also knew that I needed to write it now, before I lost memory of my grandparents’ and parents’ time. Now my father is no longer alive. I knew that if I didn’t catch it all quickly, it would go.”
This book has evidently been both a combination and a balance of patience and urgency. In many ways Kiran has had a dream career. She finished high school in India and then completed her undergraduate studies at Bennington College in Vermont, which has dark academia lore attached to it via writers like Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis. She later got her MFAs at Hollins and Columbia Universities. Graduate school, she thinks, gave her the legitimacy of calling herself a writer, but that students get used to writing groups there and write for the approval of those groups. She doesn’t think she could have written in graduate school the way she worked on this book which was in a solitary and sustained way. After finishing school, she published her debut novel “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” and eight years after that she won the Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss.”
“I am kind of mystified. I think anytime that you get to live a writer’s life, it’s fortune that you just can’t explain. It’s unbelievable luck. It has also been the one door that’s remained opened for me. If I apply for some job, I don’t get it, if I do other things, the door remains closed, stubbornly, weirdly closed, as if there is some sort of secret, weird, mystical thing happening. Whereas this one door, the one to do with writing, opens every time. I live an artistic life. That is something that carries you along, if that’s where you put your all. I can only say, be brave. Jump into your work.”
Sonia and Sunny themselves are writers. Ilan, Sonia’s toxic ex, is a visual artist tormented by his insatiable appetite for validation and fame. The book explores the artist’s life and its contentious nature. “I overlap with Sonia in her dilemmas about writing. Sonia and Sunny are westernized, and so their questions go deeper. They don’t even know their own country. Sunny wonders what kind of journalist he’s going to be. He cannot really write about India, but neither does he have any historical connection to the United States, and sometimes his covering American stories feels transgressive. Sonia too wonders what the writing landscape will be for her, there’s a self-consciousness to her. She sees herself both from the outside in and inside out. She anticipates the criticisms of her work before she even begins.”
When Kiran won the Booker in 2006 she was largely perceived as an Indian author. Now she is perceived as a New Yorker as well as an Indian author. Perception, no doubt, influences the work of a writer. There is a resistance in Kiran’s writing when it comes to giving in to the perception of being an “Indian writer.” Sometimes she fights it by humouring it, by leaning into it with exaggeration. But almost always, her writing refuses to cater to the white gaze. Her depictions of Indian life are authentically Indian, never exoticized or made to look alien to the western world. There are themes she takes seriously as a global, and Indian, writer, a big one being the inherited personal costs of colonisation. Language is the tool she uses to showcase the multilayered impacts of colonisation. Using the English language to tell the story of Indian families damaged by British rule over generations raises the emotional stakes. The English used changes from Sonia and Sunny in America, to Dadaji in the Indian military, to Babita in the social circles of Delhi. We see the characters code switch to talk to servants and housekeepers, a subtle criticism of Indian casteism and classism. Kiran believes this has always been the case for the Indian writers she admires. They have at their disposal a very formal English, like many Caribbean writers, R.K Narayan, and even her mother. But how does it feel to be creating work in a language that was responsible for so much trauma?
“I was rereading Salman Rushdie’s ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’ recently. He uses not just an Indian English, but one particular to a very specific community. I remember a way of speaking English in India, and I have so much affection for it, the chutneyfication of English so to speak”. This vernacular of English has the potential to be inherently humorous. This is true of the work of many Indian writers who use it. “My father had a wild English. It was so much fun to be back in India and hear him going through his day, yelling out of the window, negotiating the cost of things, like so many Indians. Half the sentence in Hindi. Half the sentence in English, but using the wilder aspects of each one, and the humor that comes from combining them. But yes, it’s the age old dilemma of being an Indian writer. I assume that’s true of many Indian writers, the characters in their work are going to be speaking a different language than them.”
Whether we like it or not, the Indian identity is shaped by the English language, even if an Indian person doesn’t have access to English as a language, they are sociologically affected by it, especially in the age of the internet. Yet there have been big language debates in India about the imposition of Hindi as the singular national language. Over the course of time that Kiran was writing the novel, India swung to the right wing in a big way, to Hindu fundamentalism. And America voted for Trump. But because she was writing about the period of time up till September 11, knowing how it all ended up decades later, she had to be conscious of not letting the writing be imbued with her political views of “the future.”
“I wish I could have brought the timeline up into the present day, but I also wanted to write an arc from the grandparents’ time into the present, starting with people who grew up in British India, carried through that colonial period, the Partition, and then into our globalized age. I tried to follow the politics along with the family histories. I took it up till September 11, and we, of course, haven’t stopped seeing the repercussions of that event. The world changed then. In India, there was the Babri Masjid affair, which we’re still dealing with. I found that sometimes I was writing not as a character in that moment, because I knew what had happened from the perspective of today. I had to take those things out. I had to keep correcting myself. I wish I could have continued the arguments further.”
Political thought is present as an undercurrent throughout the novel. It has been part of all of Kiran’s novels. “I was writing about the time India began to change. What interests me when it comes to the rise in nationalism is: how did it happen? I saw that happening in India when I would go back, and the language was changing in living rooms, people were speaking very differently, and the vocabulary was changing.
“In the book I was reaching back to an earlier time of people like my grandfather, who came from a very conservative background. He definitely would have married within his caste, community, class, and religion, but he deliberately undid his sense of self. He exchanged it for a very different one in service of a secular nation, with very deliberate, harsh, incredibly difficult changes. He gave up his religion, his food. He started eating meat. He had to ride a horse. He was working for the British. All of these different things. And to see a younger generation, two generations on, switching back, switching those notions again. I wanted to capture that change, I wanted to forecast the new India. I also wanted to write about things that were very precious to me in the country, that I knew we were losing, and I could now make the same argument about what’s happening in the United States.”
The book travels across countries and continents. Travel and geography is a lens in this book through which the reader looks to understand what it means to be Indian. The fluidity in geography gives Sonia and Sunny a wide breadth of human experience. But as governments across the world become obsessed with securing borders and discouraging human flow, one wonders if we were just lucky to have lived through a golden era of human exchange, whether it was an anomaly, and that now maybe it is coming to an end. Travel is formative to identity making, it allows us to step out of our world into someone else’s, and learn about ourselves. Kiran agrees, having herself grown up in a family of many heritages, and lived in multiple places. “We seek to escape our identity through travel. Often we try to find new versions of ourselves when we travel. And that’s a privilege.”
“We’re talking so much about mass migration in the Western world these days, but countries like India also have the same debates about immigration, about people coming from other countries. There’s a similar vocabulary now in India. Governments are turning people away, and yet the privileged class is traveling more than ever. So there are these two completely different worlds. I thought it important to write about how brown people vacation in Europe, in Italy, and how it differs from white people going to Italy on holiday. What does it mean to go from one non-western country to another? For an Indian to go to Mexico? Those journeys fascinate to me.”
Examining Indian characters outside of India is an effective way of understanding the Indian identity, especially through the varying perceptions of Indians in different parts of the world. In “The Inheritance of Loss,” Kiran includes a tongue-in-cheek list of all the ethnicities that don’t like Indians. In the diaspora, particularly younger folk who have grown up in the West, are always thinking about how they are perceived as an Indian person, and how that perception has changed drastically in recent times. Perhaps Indians are becoming more unlikable because of the right wing politics of their country, having acquired some distaste from neighbouring countries potentially due to its Islamophobic rhetoric. This preoccupation with perception of Indian identity is very much present in Kiran’s work.
“You don’t see yourself from the inside out, but from the outside in,” she says of being an Indian in the West. “The first thing we think of is someone else’s perception of us. There are also many people who never think this way, they don’t have to think this way. They’re at home in their country. They live in their country, as we would have, had we stayed in India. They don’t think of themselves. When you’re constantly seeing yourself from the outside in, and seeing your writing from the outside in, it makes you self-conscious. And your work is then always seen from a political angle.
“I used to envy American authors who were so at home in their country. Their writing world was so large, they could be writers who write for audiences that were just like themselves, and be published by people who were just like themselves too. They didn’t have my anxiety at all. And yet, there was a cost to that. For example, before September 11 happened, the writing world had not worried about the other, not worried about the idea of the United States out in the world, not worried about how the world views them as Americans, as American authors. When something like September 11 happened, there was shock in the literary world. People were now asking ‘Why do these people hate us? Who are they?’ This propelled the work of stepping outside and seeing America from the outside, and paying attention to how Americans are perceived.”
Kiran’s mother, Anita Desai, was also perceived as “the Indian Writer” decades earlier. “When she was a young writer, I think people in India probably thought of writing as a hobby for a long time, until she was successful, and became known as a writer. The conviction wasn’t her own. Unlike you and me, who are told that we can be writers.” Kiran’s mother achieved what seemed impossible- writing twelve novels, six story collections, three children’s books, three Booker Prize shortlists, all the while raising four children. “I’ve heard other mothers say this, that their work becomes more urgent. I remember Zadie Smith said in an interview that her language changed. She needed to get swiftly to her point because she didn’t have endless amounts of time. I know my mother also didn’t have endless amounts of time. She had a few hours here and a few hours there. I think you probably become a swifter writer that way. My mother also said there was just an urgency to rush to the table.” Kiran has a close relationship with her mother, as a daughter and as a fellow writer.
Looking ahead, Kiran is keeping busy with promotional events. If history is a predictor, Kiran will go back to her desk for a long period of time before rewarding her readers with her next work. Until then, we get to spend time with Sonia and Sunny, and keep our eyes on the Booker Prize.
Buy Kiran Desai’s book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny here, here, and here, and buy tickets to see her at the Vancouver Writers Fest here.
– Prachi Kamble