by Elizabeth Spencer

Nearly 20 years after the publication of The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny arrived last fall to great anticipation. It has been longlisted for the Booker and named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2025. The back cover is full of glowing endorsements from big-name authors. When a writer has been silent for so long, curiosity builds about what she has to say. In Desai’s case, the answer is a lot—about country and culture, memory and time, family and love, migration and travel. And art.

Part of Ann Patchett’s blurb, “I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever,” illustrates my experience as a reader. Set in the U.S., India, Mexico, and (briefly) Venice in what seem to be the late 90s (we come to 9/11 towards the end), Desai builds a vibrant world teeming with sympathetically flawed characters: strivers, lovers, aging parents, helpless servants, immigrants, and artists. At one point Sonia, reading Anna Karenina, thinks of Tolstoy: “How many millions of observations and moments it had taken to compose this book!” I felt the same way about The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and I’m guessing Desai gave Sonia, an aspiring fiction writer, some of her feelings and observations about reading and writing.

At the heart of the novel, tucked inside a sprawling, multi-generational family drama, is a love story featuring the two titular characters. After Sonia, an international student studying at a Vermont college, repeatedly calls home crying to her parents in India during an isolating winter semester when most American students leave campus for internships, her grandfather redeems a favor with a business associate to propose an arranged marriage between his grandson Sunny, a journalist living in New York, and Sonia. The proposal goes nowhere—Sunny is living with his American girlfriend Ulla and Sonia falls into a toxic romance with a much-older painter—and the two only cross paths sometime later, on a train ride from Delhi to Allahabad, where both have grandparents. About a third of the way into the 670-page novel, we get the fittingly dramatic moment when they finally meet each other at Sonia’s grandparents’ house:

“Sunny purported to cough, and just then—oh wondrous life!—another candle proceeded from the dark of the house. The air was still; the flame stood reverent. It lit only the candle-bearer’s magnificent lips of downturned reproach.”

Finding themselves in the same place when they live in different countries is only the beginning of the lovers’ rocky journey. In a pre-smartphone world, they exchange sporadic emails and oscillate over their commitment to one another on short, sad, passionate trips when Sunny returns to India for a friend’s wedding and meets Sonia in the coastal city of Goa. Then, after Sonia is denied a visa to visit Sunny in the U.S., the pair vacation in Italy, where Sonia’s past comes back to haunt her and drive the two apart.

In between the brief episodes when Sonia and Sunny are together, we follow their individual storylines in alternating chapters along with Sunny’s mother Babita, an affluent widow who struggles to forge a life for herself without her son, and—to a lesser extent in terms of time on the page—Sonia’s parents, grandparents, and maiden aunt Mina Foi. Questions of family history and inheritance abound—how much can you break free from the mold that’s been established for you by way of your ancestors’ quirks and struggles, your class position, your ability (through a visa, green card, or American passport) to leave and return.

Later in the book, Sonia thinks “she had not become a grown-up daughter, a daughter a father wouldn’t have to worry about … with an important husband, a fashionable address, one son, one daughter…” She must be only about 25 at this point, but living in a society where marriage is still the ultimate goal, even for educated women. And Sonia is haunted by the example of her aunt, who was not permitted to marry her true love and instead had a failed arranged marriage to a man who turned out to already have a family. “If you remained solitary all your life and were not well-off,” Sonia observes of Mina Foi, “you were considered an imbecile.”

Sunny, too, in his decision to pursue journalism as opposed to a more traditional career path like medicine, as his best friend Satya does, is breaking from the expectations set for him. It is satisfying to watch these characters wrestle with the consequences of their decisions, including loneliness, alienation, and self-doubt, in a way that feels very true to the experience of being in your early 20s.

While I did find myself ready for the novel to wrap up about 200 pages earlier than it does—I wanted to answer the question of whether Sonia and Sunny would end up together—there is so much richness in the book, of story and character as well as language, that it’s hard to begrudge Desai for playing out all of the different storylines to the extent that she does. Ultimately, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a novel in the style of those great old books Sonia admires: an impeccably detailed world, an epic story full of characters we can root for and relate to, who reflect our hearts back to us and show us something about their time and place as well as ours.