The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

'A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again' Sandra Cisneros

'A grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose . . . [a] sheer delight!' Namwali Serpell

© Kiran Desai 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Kiran Desai’s long-awaited third novel is an utter triumph . . . it’s one of the strongest contenders on this year’s Booker longlist . . . Sentence by sentence, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes for blissful reading . . . Desai has managed some literary alchemy. On the surface, she has written a believable but still cute will-they-won’t-they romance . . . but she also incorporates elements of magical realism . . . and through all that, Desai uses the struggle of her two writer protagonists to acknowledge, embrace and then undercut various tropes and cliches that Western readers have come to expect from her, and her compatriots
Daily Telegraph (5 stars)
A novel of stunning scope and ambition . . . Remarkable, refreshing, insistently hopeful . . . Desai’s great gift is texture. Her writing gives even minor characters a sense of history and gravity. Her people never feel invented; they seem observed . . . There’s a capaciousness, a sense that the private dilemmas of two young Indians in New York refract global histories. At a time of distracted fractured reading, Desai returns to the novel’s oldest and still most radical ambition: to make the complexity of other humans lives sharable . . . Her prose is luxurious and sensual; each item of food and shift in the quality of light is noted with such tenderness that is becomes something life affirming . . . a novel of tremendous scope and emotional richness; absorbing, poignant, funny and, above all, deeply humane
Irish Times
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has the feel, and at nearly 700 pages, the size, of a multigenerational epic. For all the book’s great scope, though, no detail is too granular to escape Desai’s notice. Through the love story of its two main characters, Indians torn between America and home, the book explores and enacts the tension between two paths for Indian fiction, social realism and magical realism, and fuses them to original and enthralling effect
Guardian
A love story, surrealist mystery, study of identity and feat of metafiction . . . The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny more than earns its buzz . . . It’s a starburst of a novel, dazzling and unforgettable . . . At nearly 700 pages, it is a long book but one that allows for the kind of intense, sumptuous immersion that can feel for the reader like being under a spell . . . Desai’s novel strives to capture nothing less than the fullness of human existence – its paradoxes, eccentricities and wonders – and at its most ambitious, the abyssal, often inexpressible devastation wrought by the loss of self . . . A love story spanning years of hurdles also demands an ending worthy of its journey. Desai delivers spectacularly
Observer
A sprawling epic love story that has consumed her life for two decades . . . far and away Desai’s most ambitious novel . . . it spans continents and unearths decades of family history, exploring the effects of globalization, the legacy of colonialism and partition in India, and the slippery, transmutable nature of identity
New York Times
A dazzling epic . . . this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature . . . immensely entertaining
Guardian
An epic romance . . . a consistently surprising saga jam-packed with incident . . . amongst it all, Desai finds time for nuanced send-ups of everything from the self-importance of a ritzy literary gala in New York to the machinations of the Indian marriage market, as well as poignant rumination on migrant experience
Sunday Times
A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel. [It is] among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people
New York Times
Desai's [novel] is so much more than a love story, exploring themes of race, class, American individualism, modern - day alienation, toxic entanglements and the fraught but fundamental need to forge connection. Steadily accruing emotional heft, it's entertaining, surprising, profound, and moving. Magnificent
Daily Mail
It demands patient engagement and offers generous rewards in return . . . this oceanic novel . . . the tides of history run alongside the currents of chance and fate that shape the lives of Sonia and Sunny . . . The writing moves fluently between distinctive voices, fusing a minutely observed realism with swirling undercurrent of magical thinking . . . The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny overspills boundaries because it addresses an impossibly huge subject. Like India itself, it refuses to be contained within modest expectations
Times Literary Supplement

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