The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel

by Kiran Desai Narrated by Sneha Mathan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A big-hearted tale from an award-winning author, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows the sweeping story of a novelist and a journalist grappling with love, home and culture. This is perfect for fans of Real Americans.

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

“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”-Ann Patchett

“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”-Sandra Cisneros

“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”-Khaled Hosseini

“A grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose.”-Namwali Serpell

“Magnificent . . . A masterpiece.”-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 New Books of the Fall ¿ One of Book Riot's Three Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

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 served only 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. She fears that 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.

*Includes a downloadable PDF of the family trees in the book

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This poignant novel—rich with culture, heartbreak, and hope—was an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less

“Beautifully-written, acutely observed, and richly textured, this is a stunning, transformative novel of both epic and intimate proportions.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, Winner of the Booker Prize

“Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return

“Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that’s also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend.”—Lauren Groff

“A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart.”—Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West

“What sheer delight! I haven’t read a book that buoyed my soul this much in a very long time—such light, such lightness, such lightness of touch; such beauty, humor, and generosity of spirit. A grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose: it softly bombarded me and broke about my heart.”—Namwali Serpell

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is both epic and intimate. This is a story of two young people, and a story of families and belonging. What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize

“Desai’s artful prose is subtle even when pitched on a grand scale. . . . This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Rich with old-fashioned storytelling and populated with fully fleshed, nuanced characters, this is a stunner worth savoring.”—Booklist, starred review

“Magnificent . . . A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-06-06
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.

Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a much older, very famous painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted arranged marriage unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication ofThe Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.

A masterpiece.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194484430
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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