Within the first few pages of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s stunning new novel, the fissures among generations, cultures, classes, and countries become abundantly clear. When Dadaji learns from his son Manav that his granddaughter Sonia, who is studying in the United States, weeps during her telephone calls back home to India because she is “lonely,” we’re told: “In Allahabad, they had no patience with loneliness.” In fact, Dadaji recalls his school days reading William Wordsworth’s poem that opens “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” a line that “struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash.” This is just one of the many divides that Desai explores in a story filled with sensitivity, complexity, and the occasional dose of humor.
Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. (Credit: Marc J. Franklin)
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, forthcoming in September from Hogarth Books, is a sweeping novel that traverses time and place, yet its heart, as Desai has characterized it, is simply “an endlessly unresolved romance between two modern Indians.” From the outset she knew that she also wanted the novel to be about “loneliness through the lens of romance.” The story unfolds through the journey of two seekers who are navigating their desire to forge individual identities yet honor family and communal heritage. A college student in Vermont, Sonia aspires to become a writer; Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York City, wonders if he can live up to Gabriel García Márquez’s belief that “fiction and reportage were two wings of the same bird….” Both feel alienated as they drift into relationships that become problematic or downright abusive. When Sonia’s grandparents worry about her self-proclaimed loneliness, and Sunny’s grandparents fret about what they see as his unsettled nature, they take matters into their own hands and attempt to arrange a traditional marriage. Their well-meaning but clumsy efforts come to nothing, although Sonia and Sunny, even before meeting, circle each other by coincidence as well as with intent, both of them drawn back to India by various circumstances, in a hyperconnected world where “loneliness” shapeshifts from the quotidian to the existential. Salman Rushdie, who calls Desai “family,” says, “Kiran knows, as all of us who have moved between worlds know, that there is heartache and loss involved in such moves. Loneliness is her word for it, a word both emotional and intellectual, and she has always worked on that frontier between the mind and the spirit.”
At nearly seven hundred pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an expansive novel—an epic, according to some early reviewers, “immersive” with its cast of fascinating characters, shifting locales, and a plot that not only is a love story, but also contains elements of a bildungsroman, thriller, and murder mystery. It has been almost two decades since Desai became the youngest author to be awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), but she offers no apologies. As the character of Sonia reflects, “This was India…you might try to write a slender story, but it’s inevitably connected to a larger one.” Acknowledging that she has already been asked what took so long for this third novel to see the light of day and expects to hear the question repeated, Desai laughs as she explains: “You really can’t answer that question without seeming a bit like a crazy person. My uncle, who is around ninety, said, and he meant this affectionately, ‘Kiran, you come across as being a little bit of a derelict.’ But I didn’t set any limits on myself when I was exploring this book—my goal was to write a kind of lexicon of global loneliness. Each of these stories of different people, cultures, landscapes could have been a separate book. I wanted to splice them together, to see them side by side, to show how they reflect each other, perhaps in an upside-down mirror, and hear echoes throughout different stories.” As she probed the meaning of loneliness, she realized that she had the challenge of not only creating something, as a novel of ideas will do, but at the same time showing a kind of nothingness, the “subtraction of a sense of self, the anxiety about losing a place, the falling away of past generations, and the terror of seeing that past vanish.” To bring it all together, she needed to take her time.
In many ways, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a book about books. One of the most charming passages is Sunny’s first glimpse of Sonia on a train: “By her side was a book. Because Sunny couldn’t abide passing a book whose title he could not read, he walked by again and saw she had a face planed like a leopard’s, long lips, and watchful eyes, hair in a single oiled braid, but he still couldn’t see the title. So he passed by again. And one more time before he detected it: Snow Country by [Yasunari] Kawabata.” Throughout the novel, together or apart, the two of them are always reading: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Anna Karenina, Where Angels Fear to Tread, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Sonia works in the college library during a holiday break and reads Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, Isak Dinesen, and Jean Rhys. Their courtship, as it were, is marked by what they are reading and their developing personas as writers. Sunny even tries to write an article about himself: “Reading Hemingway in Allahabad, Reading Hemingway in Jackson Heights.” Desai says of Sonia that slowly, gradually she “realizes that she must write herself into existence.”
There is a resonance between the novel and Desai’s own experience. As the youngest of four children growing up mostly in New Delhi, the author recalls the world of books being more vivid, more magical than the real world. Her mother, Anita Desai, is a distinguished novelist who was nominated three times for the Booker Prize. She began writing novels when her children were young but kept that activity, expected to be no more than a hobby, very private, writing when her children left for school and stopping when they returned. As far as the family knew, she led the life of a traditional wife and mother. They eventually learned otherwise. When Kiran was fifteen, her mother was invited to England as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge and took her youngest daughter, the only child left at home, with her. A year later, she accepted a teaching position at MIT and moved to the United States, where Kiran attended high school in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Kiran entered Bennington College intending to study science until she took her first writing class, taught by essayist Phillip Lopate. She describes that experience as a “revelation” that changed the direction of her life. After graduating from Bennington in 1993, Desai earned an MFA from Hollins University in Virgina, where she began work on her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998). With that publication already in hand, she enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia University in New York City, the same institution that would later, in 2009, award her a Medal of Excellence. While the role of writing and books in her mother’s life did not explicitly influence Kiran’s decision to become a writer herself—and she and her mother agree that they are very different writers—the connection is deep. The Inheritance of Loss is dedicated “To my mother, with so much love,” and in her acceptance of the Booker Prize, Kiran affirmed, “I wrote this book so much in my mother’s company, it feels almost like her book.”
Desai’s dedication for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is “In memory of my father,” and she credits him as a significant influence on her as a writer. She remembers Ashvin Desai as a voracious reader, the director of a computer software company, and the author of Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and Cosmos (Penguin Books, 2008). Continuing to live in New Delhi for the rest of his life, he was her consistent connection to India, and she often traveled back to visit him and extended family. She says that he kept her in touch with many of the issues central to The Inheritance of Loss and those she continues to explore in her new novel. After his death in 2011, she wrote the essay “Fatherland,” which appeared in the New Yorker that April and opens with her father’s lament, “We brought up our children to become perfect foreigners.” Since the pandemic, Desai has not returned to India as often, though this past winter she traveled to the Bangalore Literary Festival and spent time with elderly relatives.
Desai acknowledges that there are autobiographical connections with Sonia but, she says, “In the end, she becomes a different writer than myself.” While that is certainly true, one significant parallel between author and character is Sonia’s uncertainty about which stories are hers to tell even as she writes journalistic features on such seemingly benign topics as Indian kebabs or when she chooses to describe an Indian character eating pears rather than guava for fear of being misconstrued as stereotyping. Sunny, too, wonders what right he has to report on India in the United States, the center of perceived power, when he is essentially an outsider in both places. Desai says, “In the non-Western world especially, I believe it is in vain to think you can proclaim freedom from the concern of what the people who feel they have been represented by you think of the way you have represented them. In vain can you claim you are not a diplomat. A novel from a non-Western landscape published in the Western world will always be read from a political angle. Art may be freeing, but it is not free.”
Desai recalls hearing the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat comment that the issue of so-called exoticism is “something all of us think about, but the real question is, ‘Exotic to whom?’” Forging their identities as human beings and as writers, Sunny and Sonia must grapple with these very issues, just as Desai herself continues to do. “There is concern over beguiling white people with obscuring clouds of spices, extreme seasons such as the monsoon, too beautiful creatures such as the peacock, the titillation of arranged marriages,” Desai says. “The anger, I think, is the real fear of how we will be perceived in the larger world, the fear that stories cheapened by proliferation, decorative outside and hollow inside, will reduce the seriousness of the nation, demean its soul, deflect attention from the compelling necessity to report on a vast unreported landscape, on millions of people with middle class aspirations, the ordinariness and enormity of poverty. This anxiety of representation tends to rise when one’s nation or community has been historically underrepresented, when the world is so power imbalanced that this representation is seen as crucial, when the mistakes of the past have been too costly to repeat.” She adds: “It is exacerbated by the fact that those who most powerfully possess this opportunity of representation are those who belong to an elite class and write in English, a language often accused of eluding the Indian reality.”
All that said, the parallels between Sonia and Desai are strong. There’s a kind of narrative quirk when the narrator refers to Sonia’s mother not with her given name but as “Mama,” and then in the next sentence returns to third person, though clearly from Sonia’s perspective. Desai teases: “Sonia seems to be a narrator—and yet not. There’s always the question of whether Sonia herself is writing this novel: Is she, or isn’t she?”
Desai has divided her novel into twenty-one “chapters,” relatively short pieces with quotations from each serving as their titles. Far from being a sort of peripatetic map through time, places, plots, and subplots, however, the chapters as she describes them are “intuitive,” different pieces that she “jigsawed together” in ways that allowed her to put the past side by side with the contemporary world and, through the grandparents’ generation, show the extraordinary journey through a history of colonialism and partition. Working with this structure also let her see what she had to let go, particularly the dramatic story of her own maternal grandparents, a German woman who married an Indian man, a relationship reflected, though changed, in the parents of Sonia’s mother in the novel. Desai’s own grandmother and grandfather were introduced in Berlin in 1928, married, and lived in India, but, Desai says, “it was far too big a story for me to bring completely into this novel. When you’re writing that story, it would have to be the center. Indians were fighting for independence from Britain at the same time they were fighting with the British against the Germans at the same time my grandparents were from a freedom-fighting Bengali family and a German family. Everything was in contradiction, except for the love story.” An enticing story, it may inspire another novel, though its spirit informs The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
Then there is Badal Baba, who lends an infrastructure to the novel. Sonia’s mother passed along this “curious amulet” that had originally belonged to her own father when Sonia was leaving for America, “a demon deity to keep other demons away, to keep her safe upon her journey.” With all good intentions and belief in Badal Baba’s power, Sonia gives the amulet to Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an exploitative artist with whom she has a difficult and dangerous relationship. In a series of intricate plot twists that resemble a search for an unholy grail, Sunny eventually travels to Mexico as he tries to find and return Badal Baba to Sonia. Whether it’s a noble quest to prove his love for her, to free her from fear, or perhaps to give her back to herself, it’s a story grounded in reality.
In the acknowledgements, Desai thanks the contemporary Italian painter Francesco Clemente “for the precious gift of Badal Baba.” A contemporary of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Clemente pursued theosophy, a mystical belief in the underlying unity of all nations and races. Desai saw his work in New York, met him once, and recognized his profound link to India, where he lived during the 1970s. In 2015, “out of the blue” she received a message from him asking if she would write an introduction to an exhibition, a meditative series called Emblems of Transformation, more than one hundred watercolors that powerfully conjure India: “I love his work, so I said yes. I mentioned that there was this one painting that struck me as the culmination of the whole series, a painting of a little faceless demon—and he sent it to me as a gift. It looks like a tantric figure, exactly as described in the book, a figure slung with jewels and a broken face.” Looking at the painting every day while at her desk, Desai says it “deeply infiltrated” her work: “I wrote to him the other day and said, ‘You know, Francesco, it is as if a painting became a book.’” Whether art imitates life or art imitates art, it’s hard to imagine the novel without the ekphrastic inspiration that created Badal Baba, a mysterious figure, or force, that Desai interweaves into the lives of so many of her characters in this saga of loneliness, loss, and love.
Her description in that gallery catalogue about how viewing those paintings made her feel could serve as a statement about her own novel: “When I saw Clemente’s paintings, I thought again of exultation in the ideas of proliferation and exchange, of identity being undone and recovered in different configurations….” Rarely associated with “exultation,” loneliness is in Desai’s hands a multifaceted state of being filled with the possibility, if not the promise, of change and transformation. What, she seems to be asking, are the options for these “global citizens” or “global bastards” as her father calls the westernized Indians in “Fatherland”? Novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros, who offered one of the prepublication blurbs, says this is precisely why the novel is ideal for this moment: “We’re living in a time when we have a lot of global orphans, people who have traveled and become disconnected from their home communities but don’t quite belong to their adopted environments. What I call them is alebrije, like the Mexican word for these dreamlike creatures that are half animal, head of a bird, feet of a dog. They’re alebrije, a little bit of this, a little bit of that; they fly all over the world but aren’t quite native anywhere.” Perhaps only a writer with Desai’s gifts can inspire readers’ trust to go along on this journey into “a world beyond this world,” as Sonia says, with the hope of soothing the ache of such displacement.
One manifestation of the estrangement that comes when traditional connections are fragmented is to look elsewhere, often in desperation, as in the case of Ilan, the older artist Sonia turns to without realizing the dark spell he will cast over her life for years. In a distorted logic of his own making, he reasons that “if you have no home, no faith, no community, and a scattered, inattentive, or resentful family, you are alone in the big world. If you are not famous, you don’t exist.” Through Ilan, Desai explores her interest in ego, fame, and narcissism in the artistic life. “I was thinking of fame as a counterpoint to loneliness and what that means when fame shatters everyone around you. I write in this novel about people who are bought and sold until there seems to be nothing left but fame or the desire for it.” As it turns out, trying to evoke a whole world that loves you is not a good plan, nor is demanding absolute devotion of anyone near you a bulwark against loneliness.
Desai’s cast of characters, especially older women, find more reliable stays against loneliness, through friendship. Sonia’s mother leaves her tired marriage to live quietly eight hours from Delhi at Cloud Cottage, “where time had been cultivated to be as slow and unconcerned as a turtle,” what Desai calls “her earned peace.” She has a deep friendship with Ferooza, a Muslim woman, both of them coming to understand the sharp distinction between loneliness and solitude. Sunny’s mother, the thoroughly westernized Babita, who is according to Desai “full of every kind of prejudice and greed,” nearly suffocates her son with her overwhelming love, yet in her most desperate hour she flees to Goa, on the southwestern coast of India, and forges a tender friendship with Sonia, the woman she has seen all along as a threat to her son and thus her own sworn enemy. Desai says that these two women, having gone through a similar darkness, “belong naturally together, just as Sunny and Sonia belong naturally together. I was thinking of loneliness in its more painful incarnation, but it is actually a great gift to think that your personality is not fixed, that to have a loss of identity may be a situation of richness, to consider that humans might actually seek out a loss of identity as much as they seek the opposite. They seek transformation.” Understanding this paradox, Sonia’s mother tells her daughter, “There are worse things than loneliness. Loneliness could mean abiding peace. It could mean understanding your happiness backwards.”
Desai says she would not have swerved back to India in such an emotional way as she has in this new novel were it not for the political shift to the far right the country has recently undergone. “I used some of that emotion for Sunny. He says if you see what your parents and grandparents fought for being attacked, wouldn’t you feel you had to go back and fight again? That’s part of what I hoped to do in this book.” She says that even in her early days at the Loreto Convent School, the mantra of secularism and tolerance was always at the heart of India: “That was what I was taught, how my grandparents and parents spoke, but at some point the language changed. I never thought India would succumb to a government like this. I’ve seen how once fear is introduced into a nation, that is almost the end of the story. It’s very hard to undo the disaster. And I have to say I never thought I’d see it starting to happen in the United States. That’s the heartbreak, these two countries that I love.” She’s doing her part, believing that “books work as museums; they preserve something about a country, and there’s also something to preserve in art when a country is drastically changing.”
Desai continues in this reflective mood as she looks forward to the tours and travel of the next months when The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is out in the world. Admitting that she struggled with the novel’s ending, she leaves us with questions. Does love conquer all? Is it a leap of faith to think that these two “modern young Indians” have exorcised their individual demons sufficiently to come together for a happy ending? And what about Desai herself? Unmarried and without children, she smiles as she recounts her own experience, like Sonia’s, alone during a holiday break, working in a mostly deserted college library. At one point she was told she was the worst employee ever, as measured by how long it took to shelve a cart of books: “I was opening those books and not doing my job. When I read the books, I think I always knew I wanted to write a love story. Still, in that library I experienced loneliness, real loneliness, but also exquisite artistic loneliness: You’re lonely but also exquisitely happy if it’s snowing outside and you’re working on a novel. There’s nothing more gorgeous than that.”
Writer and educator Renée H. Shea has contributed extensively to Poets & Writers Magazine, including profiles of Edwidge Danticat (September/October 2024) and Julia Phillips (July/August 2024). A number of her interviews appear in World Literature Today, most recently a conversation with Dinaw Mengestu (March/April 2025). She is currently conducting an interview series for the American Book Review on “The Laureates.” She also coauthors English language arts textbooks for Bedford, Freeman & Worth.
