The first reading of Kiran Desai’s new novel shows loneliness is cultural and systemic

Glance through it too quickly, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny might read like a rom-com destined for the airport bookshelf. The marketing even leans into this misdirection. What unfolds, however, is far richer and complex: an intimate portrait of families bound by strained ties; a story of two lovers navigating their relationship amid cultural expectations and past traumas; a meditation on power dynamics; and a nuanced exploration of immigration, race, and gender in the post-colonial world.

Desai’s return to fiction after an astonishing 19-year hiatus is nothing short of triumphant. Her 2006 Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, a family saga set in the northeastern Himalayas, established her as a writer with incisive observation and wit. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, out today, is already longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Loneliness and isolation

Though set in the 1990s and early 2000s, the novel feels startlingly contemporary. Its true subject is loneliness, and, for Desai, loneliness is never just emotional. It is political, cultural, systemic. It comes baked into the immigrant experience, surfacing as self-erasure and self-hatred.

This systemic loneliness manifests in the ways the characters navigate their lives. Sonia retreats into isolation as a graduate student in a small Vermont college town, where her most consequential tie is to an...

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