'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is a terrific, tangled love story

Maureen Corrigan

October 03, 2025 / 7:22 am

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, po

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