The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)
Why this one?
Continuing with this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, which has so far proved to be relatively enjoyable. I’d been waiting for this one to come out since the longlist was released - it would have been top of my list having previously enjoyed Desai’s 2006 Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss.
Kiran Desai (1971- ; active 2006- ), was born in Delhi, and is the daughter of three-time Booker shortlisted novelist Anita Desai. Both left India when Kiran was 14, spending a year in England before moving to the US. She studied creative writing at Columbia University.
Her first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award for young Commonwealth authors. The Inheritance of Loss was her second novel, and its Booker win made her the youngest female winner to date, aged 35. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award.
The Inheritance of Sonia and Sunny comes some 19 years after its predecessor, with Desai saying she has focused on virtually nothing else in the intervening years, a fact that shows in the richness of this 688-page doorstopper.
Thoughts, etc.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an epic family saga centring on the lives of Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, two young people from India whose paths intertwine. The story is initiated by a clumsy and half-hearted failed attempt to engineer an arranged marriage between the two by their neighbouring families in India. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who has been studying in Vermont, returns home to India after a deeply troubling relationship in New York with a memorably deranged and controlling older artist named Ilan de Toorjen Foss. She is haunted by this encounter, believing he may have cast a "dark spell" on her (which manifests - seemingly physically - as a ‘ghost hound’ later in the novel). Sunny, a struggling journalist, is working for the Associated Press in New York City, living in Brooklyn with his American girlfriend Ulla. He too returns to his home country, initially to help his friend Satya in his own attempts to secure an arranged marriage.
The main plot begins with Sonia and Sunny’s chance meeting on an overnight train in India, which ignites an on-off romance between them. While this relationship blossoms for a time, it’s seemingly thwarted by the complexities both of the young characters face in their families, personal histories and roles as immigrants of a new generation, trying to make it in non-traditional ‘immigrant careers’ while maintaining some sort of connection to their cultural identity. Sonia grapples with the expectations of her family, particularly her father, as she navigates the complexities of her writing career and the ongoing trauma of her abusive relationship. Sunny’s life, while less trauma-ridden and ostensibly moving in a more positive direction, remains complicated by his overbearing mother, Babita, who is embroiled in a larger-than-life crime plot back in India, involving her late husband's brothers.
Overall this was an absolute joy to read. One thing that immediately stands out about Desai’s writing is its density of thought. It’s never overly knotty, and is in most senses a really easy breezy read, but at the same time each page is crammed with ideas. Nothing is passed by without a fresh, finely crafted observation accompanying it. With this richness, the book is able to marry its very specific concerns (India’s changing role in a globalised world, most obviously) with more universal ideas and commentary on human nature, love, family and (obviously) loneliness. At times it’s easy to get carried away with the overall readability and the momentum of the central plot (if you strip it down, the main through-line is a relatively traditional will-they-won’t-they love story) but there’s a huge amount of pleasure to be gained in dwelling on this one at a sentence-by-sentence level.
That brings me to the subject of its length. At times I did find myself thinking that, given this page and sentence level density, a book of half the length would have been just as rewarding, and somewhat tighter in terms of focus. I’m ultimately in two minds about this - it’s definitely the case that its central (and most straightforwardly compelling) story could have been told in fewer pages, but it’s also true that there’s pleasure to be found on most pages (so why curtail it?) and also that in many ways its length, globe-spanning scale and extensive list of well-formed characters is essential to its depiction of its central idea - the disconnection between it characters and their loneliness in an ever-more globalised world.
Its concerns feel somewhat different to those of the migrant characters in Desai’s previous novel - where in particular movement to the US was motivated by economic necessity and other concerns (while present) were somewhat lesser. The migrants in that book were comparatively invisible, working literally underground in basement restaurants and dealing only with their immediate surroundings. In this book, times have changed and the migrants we meet are part of a globalised ‘academic’ class, no longer struggling to survive but more to establish identity and connection in a world in which they are now much more integrated (mixing in artistic and literary milieux) but still somehow ‘other’, belonging neither to their home, family and tradition, nor to the new circumstances in which they find themselves (and where their ‘dreams’ - at least ostensibly- lie). This makes for an appropriately Booker-ish development of the story of India in its winning novels, which was a hugely significant and evolving theme over my read-through of previous winners (from immediately post-colonial stories told by the former colonisers, via Rushie’s carnivalesque reclaiming of the narrative, to the winners (including Desai herself) earlier this century that moved the story closer to the present world.
In this book, Desai notably doesn’t bring us especially close to the present day. It’s still a retrospective analysis, albeit one that feels very deliberately chosen as a moment at which many of the conditions for our modern world were being established and an old order further upended. Set primarily between 1996 and 2002, it captures a period at which the conditions for this globalised movement of intelligent young people was established (India moving more outward and capitalist; the ‘West’ for a time at least opening its doors to those who wanted to enter; etc) yet one that is prior to our present age of digital (dis)connectedness in which the loneliness depicted would take an altogether different form. It also notably captures many of its characters’ reactions to 9/11 - mostly from a distance but with a keen eye to how their status as ‘others’ in the west (particularly the US) will immediately change - its main players are suddenly dramatically more visible and in this we get a sense that the moment captured in this book is one which is soon to change, again, in numerous and significant ways.
These big themes about India, the US, the world in general and its inhabitants are what lend the book its likely status as a favourite to win this year’s Prize, fitting neatly as they do into a constant dominant through-line of Booker history. But it’s really the character studies in this book that take it to another level. Its titular characters are obviously central to everything, and sufficiently interesting to make the main romantic plot worth investing, but in many ways it’s their reaction to those around them that is what brings the book to life. If there’s a gravitional pull that exists dragging Sonia and Sunny together through the book, there’s also an oppositional force acting by which they are both trying to escape more toxic relationships in their past. For Sunny, they are mainly familial, with his dramatic mother Babita acting as a regular impediment to his progress in life, until he begins to cut ties and find his purpose later in the book. For Sonia, it is escaping the more clear and present danger of relationships with toxic men, most notably Ilan. The latter character is by far the most memorable here, in his wild egocentricity, pathetic neediness and relentless gaslighting and controlling behaviour, to the point at which his influence follows Sonia around in the form of a rabid ‘ghost hound’.
If these very real concerns are the most gripping and emotionally impactful elements of the book, its drift into the realms of the more fantastical felt somewhat less successful and complete, to me at least. I’m rarely a fan of these kinds of devices when thrown in on such a limited basis (dreams, hallucinations, metaphors for mental issues rather than genuinely weird fantasy stuff), and this felt like the case here to some extent. These sections do serve a purpose in the novel, most notably as vivid shorthand for the trauma following its characters (especially Sonia) around, but also as a kind of metafictional device. Sonia, an aspirational writer, is told by Ilan that she should avoid supposed cliches (‘orientalist nonsense!’) of her country’s writing like ‘magical realism’ (as well as other handy hints like not writing about arranged marriages). Desai, of course, playfully breaks all of these rules, finding more truth in placing these tropes (somewhat subverted) alongside a range of other themes which are less ‘expected’. Sonia, towards the end of the book, is also learning to break those rules, offering a more optimistic vision of her future career, maybe one rooted in honesty of expression rather than the tortured hysteria advocated by Ilan and his ilk.
Score
9.5
You can pick holes in certain aspects of this (inevitable I think in a book this big and rich) but ultimately it’s a joy of a read, one to savour and get lost in. It feels suitably momentous, more than justifying the many years that went into its creation, and it’s hard to describe it as anything other than a favourite to win.
Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.
(If you click through and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission from Bookshop.org at no additional cost to you, which helps support local independent bookshops. I’ll only share these links for the highest rated titles on the site. )
Next up
Finally getting around to Audition.
