Kiran Desai / Photo by M. Sharkey / Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Newly released in paperback, Kiran Desai’s latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, 2025), is a family saga of both Sunny and Sonia, its two primary characters. Sunny, a Delhi-raised upper-middle-class boy, is pursuing his career as a journalist in New York, while Sonia, who is also from a similar social background, is in her final undergrad year at a college in Vermont. 

Their parallel lives seem to meet at an intersection when their grandparents, who happen to be neighbors in Allahabad, propose a possible match for marriage between them. But the match initially gets discarded by Sunny, who is in a live-in relationship with a white American girl. Sonia also dates a middle-aged artist who helps to get her a job in an art gallery in New York. But neither Sunny nor Sonia has a smooth relationship; they are haunted by racial complexities, class hierarchy, and psychological issues that lead to their loneliness. 

Sunny and Sonia are haunted by racial complexities, class hierarchy, and psychological issues that lead to their loneliness.

The novel foregrounds complex relationships between family, friends, and loved ones. Sunny, who is far away from his dominating mother (Babita), struggles to overcome her shadow that follows him from New York to Mexico. While Sonia gets trapped in a psychological trap where she is haunted by a dog painted by Elon, with whom she had a brief affair. Besides, they are also haunted by their racial and cultural identities. This angle of the story makes it denser as it no longer remains a personal story; rather, it becomes a shared story of every migrant in the US. It portrays how race can play its silent role in a relationship between an American girl and an Indian boy; solidarity and complex tensions between different migrant communities; and most interestingly the mundane politics of making oneself “belong” to the migrated land and the subtle rivalry of belonging among the people of the same migrant community. As Desai puts it, “One Indian alone is luckier than two Indians together.”

Within these webs of complexity, Sonia and Sunny strive to make their space. Sunny, on one hand, like many other elite kids of a modern Indian metropolis, was encouraged to learn English with much more care than his native language, Hindi. This always follows him like a shadow as he navigates his space in both countries. He can never become a true Indian as he has not been made familiar with his roots during childhood, yet, on the other hand, no matter how much he tries, he can never suit himself as a New Yorker. Therefore, his feeling of not belonging places him in a double bind.

Sonia, on the other hand, after returning from the States, is seen as a failure by her fellow citizens as they consider living in America equivalent to a successful life. All these social and personal complexities push the two characters to experience extreme loneliness while they rediscover themselves in a new way to remain afloat.

All these social and personal complexities push the two characters to experience extreme loneliness while they rediscover themselves in a new way to remain afloat.

In the backdrop of the intersection of two centuries, this novel tries to capture stories of generations that are slowly fading out and the existential survival of the younger ones within an altered world. This is not a period piece but an intergenerational epic that can be relatable to generations of readers to come.

University of Oklahoma