This is Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize-longlisted novel about two young Indians adrift in the world and searching for love and belonging.
Sonia is an aspiring writer who returns to India after studying in Vermont. She has fled a disturbing relationship with a mentally unstable older artist who crushed her independence and self-confidence. Sunny, meanwhile, lives in New York, working as a journalist. He longs to escape his domineering mother and the tangled violence that dogs his complicated family but feels trapped between loyalty and his desire for freedom.
Their paths cross on an overnight train, where an awkward spark hints at possibility. Years earlier, their grandparents had tried – and failed – to arrange a marriage between them. Now, Sonia and Sunny must decide if fate is offering them another chance, or if their lives are too weighed down by family history, geography and the scars of the past.
Hilarious, insightful and moving, the novel zigzags between India and America, weaving themes of class, race and generational disconnect. It is at once a love story, a family epic and a meditation on loneliness in a globalised world. One warning: at nearly 700 pages, this is a brick of a book that takes some commitment. I think it could have been shorter.

This was a novel long - really long - in length but also in ideas featuring Sonia and Sunny who are trying to find a path towards each other despite the barriers that are put in front of them through family and misfortune.

The writing is full of verve and the characters credible and interesting. and the plot never fails to engage and engross.

A thought provoking and fascinating read.

Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me. I found the book difficult to get into and for the story to get going. I may try it again in the future, but for now it's a no from me.

A very long, epic story, but one that kept me engrossed throughout. Sonia and Sunny have both left India for the US, and are both lonely in their different ways.

This detailed, immersive book follows their lives and those of their meddling families as they’re all drawn together and apart over the years.

There was a small amount of magical realism, which I didn’t like and a bit too much introspection on occasion, but overall a fabulous read.

Sonia and Sunny search for belonging, exploring relationships and family bonds, analysing what culture, racism and identity mean to them. There are different timelines and many characters across this stunning novel, all building the picture. Desai’s writing is brilliant, real and witty. As a South Asian myself, some dialogues rang very true. It is so much more than a story about loneliness, immigration and customs. I did feel that the book was a bit longer than it should have been, but I did enjoy reading it.
This was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and it’s a fantastic contender. Thank you Penguin and NetGalley for the advance copy.

A beautiful and sweeping epic, which plays around with, and subverts, the expected types of narrative we would expect in a love story. The book spans around 20 years and does so effortlessly, moving seamlessly between moments of joy and anger.

I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A huge novel of loneliness in many different forms. Sonia and Sunny are two young people both finding their way towards each other and being pulled apart across continents. They experience the loneliness of migration, within their own family relationships and also their friends and lovers.

This novel fizzes with ideas and distinctive characters and Desai writes in a way that had me furiously highlighting beautifully written passages which I want to refer back to and remember, then had me snorting with laughter the next. Sonia and Sunny separately experience the difficulty of navigating their shifting identities depending on which country they are in and the people they are with. Both are writers who use writing as a way of observing and separating themselves as well as to connect.

Don’t read this for romance: it’s there but it’s a slow burn. Don’t pick it up if you want a quick read (it is a looong book). This is a literary novel for someone who wants to immerse themselves in a complex world of relationships, stories and ideas. I imagine university literature students will be assigned this book one day and it provides a wealth of ideas, from colonialism and racism, to emotional abuse and issues of class. It’s clever, witty, dense and multi-layered, and will expand the experience of the reader who decides to engage with this tour de force.

A gorgeous, wise, sweeping odyssey charting nations, histories, neighbourhoods, families. This is a powerful novel exploring everything from love, culture and identity to the clash between tradition and modernity. A long read, but a total pleasure to submerge into.

when you get such a sweeping and intimate tale of peoples life, when you know snippets and then deeper times in their lives, when done well, i do love it when you get these sage types book where you can just get and feel fully involved.
its not rushed. its not forced. its deliberate and detailed and just the way it should be to truly capture the souls of our characters and they in turn capture ours from reading this book.
this book is also about so much more than the main players of the books. we see the effects of family, love,loyalty. we see the effects of culture and race. we see the full breadth of life in so many ways and a lot of that for our pair and where we meet them comes from many lows. much of which is feeling adrift, lost and not quite fitting or knowing where you belong.
through getting to know the characters and their family we get to see so many flaws, themes, successes and not so successful moments. we get to see the moments these two feel like they are falling and failing and how much connection means to people.
the scene setting Kiran did was just beautiful. i have never been to the places she mentions but she brought them into full colour for me. i could almost feel, sense and smell the places she was talking of.
this novel was moving and emotional. it made me think. it made me feel right into my chore. and it made me go on to think after id read it. this is one of those books i like to call my quiet books that mean they are the loudest ones. because they are still, they are calming and you sat there stilled and calmed. but there is so much to them, there is so much in them that speak louder in your mind, heart and thoughts.
loved this book. i got through it in record time by being incredbly rude to anyone who even whispered an attempt at disturbing me!
it made me nostalgic for when i used to read alot more tomb of a book books. i need to find more...

Despite the glowing reviews, the only pithy way I can describe this behemoth of a novel is 'too long'. I don't mind long books, if the author has something to say that genuinely takes that long to say. Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy' for example, or Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. I admit to judging longer books more strictly than shorter - if I'm going to invest such a large proportion of my time in reading something I expect it to be proportionally good. Same principle as if you pay more for something you expect better quality, and time is just as much an investment as money. I could have read three standard length novels in the time it took me to get through this epic, and any or all could (probably would) have been better.

It is certainly an achievement though to write such an incredibly long book and say so very little. The story is the most basic of love stories, with no real intrigue or surprises. The title characters are young, middle class Indians educated in America and navigating their twenties during the 1990s and early 2000s. At the start of the book, their grandparents make a failed attempt to set them up. Sonia has an affair with an artist who is a total jerk, Sunny with a white all-American girl. They meet by chance halfway through the book and decide they like each other after all. But their overbearing relatives, Sonia's trauma from the controlling relationship with the artist, and the fact they live on different continents all conspire to make the course of true love not run smoothly.

We do hear incidentally along the way about some of their friends and relatives - Sunny's widowed mother who is in a long running financial dispute with her brothers-in-law; Sonia's divorced aunt living with her elderly parents; the tempestuous artist Ilan; and (my favourite, who gets little page time), Sunny's kind hearted friend Satya. Some of these characters are much more interesting than Sunny and Sonia are, but you get little more than tantalising vignettes before the story returns to the tedious and overwritten lives of the central pair.

I didn't feel strongly for any of characters, which is surprising when I read so many pages about them. If you love and care about a set of characters, there's no chore in reading about their lives. That's why I loved 'A Suitable Boy' even when it went on about politics for long sections. But here I really wasn't fussed about what happened to the characters. I didn't dislike them either - I just didn't really feel anything for them. They seemed very flat. So much was written about them, yet it all somehow amounts to nothing much.

Desai isn't a bad writer in terms of how she puts words together, and there are set pieces that are really readable. At times I'd find myself enjoying a particular section - often those concerning the minor characters or where something more notable takes place. But those are rare gems hidden in an awful lot of padding.

If you like books that have style over substance, and aren't too fussed about plot or characters but just like words for the sake of words, I guess you may enjoy this. I find it hard to recommend as I am someone who considers at least one of an interesting plot or characters I can care about essential to a novel. Think carefully before investing many hours of your precious life in reading this tome and ask yourself if those things are important to you too - if they are, it might be better to look out a different story (Desai's novel 'The Inheritance of Loss' is better).

A sprawling, fantastical odyssey which fans out across the globe. Sunny and Sonia are originally from Delhi, but have both been given the opportunity to move to America and make their families proud. Sunny is in New York trying to make it as a journalist. Sonia is in New England, lonely and adrift in the university holidays. Their loneliness shapes them and drives them to plug the hole in different ways to their own detriment and damage. Sonia's family want her to meet Sunny. Sunny's family don't want him to meet Sonia. Over the course of several years and thousands of miles they are destined to meet and part until they can come to terms with who they are both together and apart, and their relationship with India. In some respects this reminded me of Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It has the same vastness and scope and the themes of what it is to be Indian and how to balance modernity against the antiquity and tradition of the country that birthed you, as well as the magical threads woven through both books. Having said that, I loved this book much much more than Midnight's Children. Kiran Desai is so good at character and humour and generous with her way of letting you into the world she creates. This is a big book and I powered through it in a few days and was sad to finish it.

What a fabulous book I can see why It was nominated for the Booker Prize this year. This is. Book you can immerse yourself in and get lost. The vivid descriptions of the different neighbourhoods with all the sights and smell a so evocative. This love story is interwoven with a deep insight into Hindu culture and how it is so deeply embedded in the family dynamic. That Sonia and Sunny ever finally get together seems a miracle but one that is well worth investing your time in.

So conflicted about this book!

At times I loved it. Set in 90s India but spreading out around the world, it has the capacious, immersive feel of a Victorian novel. Desai frequently references Anna Karenina, but it made me think of Trollope, where a slightly contrived romance plot provides the spine for a much more interesting story about family and society. It has Trollope's key preoccupations of money, class and marriage, but also an Indian perspective on race, religion and the trauma of Partition. It also has a lot of humour, particularly in the characterisation of the older family members.

What I enjoyed less was Sonia's frequent introspection about the meaning of art, and the supernatural elements that illustrate her emotional journey. I also struggled a bit with the portrayal of Sonia's relationship with an older artist. It's tricky to both show his abusive behaviour and make us understand what she found attractive about him. For me, he seemed creepy and affected from the start which made it hard to buy into Sonia's obsession. I also am over the whole tortured artist trope. Even Desai expresses, via Sonia's ruminations, an awareness that she is going down a cliched path, which makes me wish she'd trusted Sonia's instincts and curtailed them.

It's often the end of a book that stays with you. Unfortunately, it's the magic and contrivance and the introspection that draws the novel to a close. If it had been buried in the middle, and the novel had instead ended with a big set-piece event which teased out the tortuous interaction between romantic love and social forces, I'd have probably forgotten about it. I enjoyed my time with this book, but I didn't quite love it by the end.

“Sunny broke the silence between himself and Babita by accusing Babita of bringing him up in such a Westernised manner that he’d always be a foreigner in his own country,”

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a powerful novel.. This is the story of two individuals and their search for identity and belonging.

Booker prize nominated and understandably so; this is a book rich in wonderful prose and narrative delights: a family saga ; a tale of the deep binds between parents and children; an essay on identity and race ; an exploration of cultural differences ; a journey across continents to ultimately find love and meaning.

Sonia and Sunny come from India and have competed their education in the USA : Sonia finds herself working in a gallery where she encounters and enigmatic and highly coercive artist who leads her into a crisis of identity and entrapment. She returns to India her she is torn between supporting each parent whilst trying to determine who she is.

Sonny works as a journalist but cannot achieve the success he dreams of- he continually questions and explores the role aspirations and exploitations of the migrant population in New York. The desire to escape and follow his own path - not becoming another person of colour fighting for identity. But still the pull of family cannot release him to feel free - his mother who continually tries to control and put emotional expectations upon him is always in the background.

Both Sonia and Sunny are lost and lonely …their paths cross but it isn’t the envisaged resolution for them both to find peace- one family has recommended a marriage between them. Yet the fragile connections between families mean they enter each others lives,

The stories of both characters ( set between the mid 1990s and early 2000s ) reflects the story of millions who cross the planet “ to improve “ their lot: the aspirations and pseudo snobbery of parents for their young to escape and “ become something “ in the USA so they can boast to family and friends. It is the family / parental stories that are equally as important in this book. At times they drive you to despair and you feel the pressure upon the two protagonists but the book raises questions to the reader as to how we “ judge others “ without cultural awareness and historical understanding of a period and ancestral demand. .

Kiran Desai has written another incredible novel - a gap of 19 years since the Booker winning The Inheritance of Loss.
This novel certainly deserves the plaudits it will receive and is a book that you need to discuss with friends / fellow readers.

A six hundred and fifty page read that doesn’t slow down for a moment and continually challenges us to question how we reflect upon our own lives and connections ( since the smart phone and Covid - loneliness is now a global epidemic ) and value and respect choices and reasons made by all people who make a move for one country to another or one continent to another and search for how to belong and not lose their true identity.


Much will be written about this book and a wait of 19 years certainly was worth it . This review only slightly touches the messages in this epic tome.

Superb !!! Powerful and worthy of attention ! The lives of Sonia and Sunny will stay with you long after competing this book

Quotes:

“He looked at himself in the mirror. He was a brown man who might have been of several nationalities, or in-between nationalities, or no nationality. An anonymous brown man of no importance.”

“ For just a few days I wanted to forget I’m a ThirdWorlder who must worry about other Third-Worlders.”

“Like myself, many seekers come to India and don’t know what they are searching for. They became a mirror to the country they have arrived in, and in the eyes of the people they meet, they find a mirror to themselves.”

Thank you to Penguin books and NetGalley for the advance copy

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sweeping, intricate work that takes the reader across continents, cultures and generations. Kiran Desai delivers a deeply immersive story about two young people whose lives intersect and diverge, shaped by love, family, tradition and modernity.

When Sonia and Sunny first meet on an overnight train, they are instantly drawn to one another, yet embarrassed by the knowledge that their grandparents once tried to match them. Sonia, an aspiring writer returning to her family in India after studying in Vermont, carries the weight of a past encounter with an artist whose influence still lingers. Sunny, a journalist in New York, is attempting to escape both his overbearing mother and the violence of his extended family. Together, they search for happiness in a modern world filled with displacement, longing and questions of identity.

Desai’s storytelling is rich and layered, exploring themes of colonialism, globalisation, art, memory and the ways personal histories intersect with wider historical forces. There is a dreamlike quality to parts of the narrative, where reality blurs and certain answers are deliberately left untold, reflecting the complexity of life itself.

This is a meandering but rewarding journey, filled with vivid, fully realised characters and a narrative that lingers in the mind. Desai’s prose is elegant, her observations sharp, and her ambition evident on every page. For readers who enjoy thought-provoking, emotionally resonant fiction, this is a story worth experiencing.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

I loved this book!!
I this book we meet Sonia & Sunny and we see how for various reasons they have loneliness in their lives. We see how they meet and the ripples of what happens after that initial encounter.

There are also lots of side characters in this which are fully realised. Babita being the most complex of those. Parental relationships is an interesting theme in this along with mental health, race & class and much much more.

I highlighted so many passages in this book as the writing is just gorgeous. I am definitely ordering a copy of my own and I already can’t wait to re-read it when I get that copy!!

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the epic new novel from Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize in 2006. Over its 700 pages, Desai manages to weave a truly magisterial story which crosses countries, classes and history to tell the story of it's central protagonists and how they are connected, divided and united. When you're in the hands of a master storyteller like Desai, you simply surrender to her will and let her guide you - floating through the pages being dazzled by brilliance is an experience I won't forget easily. It's 700 pages breezed by, I was that engrossed.

Predominantly set in India and the United States. Sonia is an aspiring novelist, alone in the US and missing her family. Sunny is a struggling journalist, looking to broaden his world. The story of how these two meet and deal with their loneliness is both funny, emotional and moving, and the extended cast of characters that fill their lives broaden the novel into something much deeper and fulfilling. You come to care for these characters at the end. A truly brilliant novel.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is a richly woven tale that takes the reader from India to the USA, Italy and Mexico as it follows not just the titular characters but also their extended famiies, making for a complex tapestry of character, culture and setting.
Sonia is introduced as a lonely student studying in a small university in Vermont, where she meets a much older artist and embarks on what becomes a very abusive relationship with him which lasts far longer than it should have and has after effects that ripple through her future and almost destroy her happiness. Sunny is a struggling journalist living in New York with his girlfriend Ulla, a relationship that he is keeping secret from his family, knowing that they would not approve of her. When he receives a letter from his grandparents reluctantly suggesting that he consider their friend's grandaughter Sonia as a potential bride he treats it as a joke but when he meets her in person some time later the two begin a relationship. The course of true love never did run smoothly however and given that this book runs to over six hundred pages you can be sure that there are some trials and tribulations involved.
This book is a blend of family saga and love story with a hint of magical realism thrown in for good measure, The writing is thought provoking at the sentence level and beautifully descriptive, bringing both settings and characters vividly to life on the page, The complexities of family, heritage, race and culture are explored wonderfully in a way that is thought provoking without being overwhelming. Though dark at times there is a thread of humour that weaves through the book and the ending is hopeful and satisfying and definitely worth the journey.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

What a treat. This is a wonderful book, full of history and hope and magic. It tells of love and family and relationships. India and its customs are portrayed alongside a sketch of American customs, their differences and the difficulties of being a 'second class' citizen with a 'brown' face. It tackles the philosophy of living, not quite in your own place and by being sent abroad to study how you lose the sense of 'home' when in India, too. Their sense of alienation comes across in these pages.

Sonia and Sunny are both lonely whilst away from India studying in America. But despite this being likely to happen, they do not properly meet until this book is almost halfway through. Meanwhile, we learn a lot about their respective backgrounds and their families, their family ties, their fathers, their mothers, quite vividly portrayed. Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, and are attracted to each other, especially as Sonia is reading yet the knowledge that their grandparents tried to make a match between them keeps this 'modern' couple apart..

Sonia, is a writer of fiction and successful published factual and Sunny is an aspiring journalist in New York, who is finding it tough.. Sunny is in thrall to his widowed mother and trying to break free. Sonia is also trying to break free of a tempestuous love affair with a much older artist. Even after this affair has ended she is haunted.

Sonia thinks to herself when reading a novel, 'How many millions of observations and moments it had taken to compose this book!'. I immediately highlighted this as very apt for 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Desai's writing is wonderful and very easy to read but will have you pondering about significance. A snatch on the difference between male and female,
''she had learned that men in church are taught to open a door for a lady to go first, pull a chair out for a lady to sit, insist ladies stand first in the buffet line. The opposite of Hindu and Muslim men, who strode in first, sat down first, ate first, all the tenderest, all the oiliest, all the crunchiest, all the sweetest.'
Just brilliant and very highly recommended as my favouite read this year, August 2025. I read an ARC provided by NetGalley and the publishers.

'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is a glorious, sweeping love story following the lives of two Indian young people in both India and America. When the novel starts, both Sonia and Sunny are in America - Sonia as a student in Vermont, where she begins a toxic and all-consuming relationship with Ilan, an older artist, and Sunny as a budding journalist in New York, where he lives with his midwestern girlfriend Ulla. Back in India, Sonia's grandparents, hearing of Sonia's loneliness (an alien concept to them), attempt to broker an arranged marriage through Sunny's grandparents; this is quickly rebuffed without Sonia and Sunny ever meeting, but it sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually bring them together.

Kiran Desai paints on a vast canvas: as well as Sunny and Sonia's own adventures together and apart, we follow the lives of their parents and grandparents (as well as Sonia's aunt, divorced after six months of marriage who continues to live with her parents into her fifties). These are all immensely complex and compelling characters, and through their stories, Desai is able to explore changing attitudes towards family, relationships and national identity between different generations with tremendous insight and nuance. Art and language also play a prominent role in the novel, through Ilan's paintings and Sunny and Sonia's writing.

Prior to its publication, this novel has already been deservedly longlisted for the Booker Prize: as well as being a brilliant read, it is a major work of postcolonial fiction that deserves serious recognition and critical attention. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.