Belonging and Beyond

Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai discusses her sweeping new novel, in which she explores themes of migration, memory, love, and the burden of history across generations

- Aditya Mani Jha

A NOVEL OVER TWO DECADES IN THE MAKING, by a celebrated young Booker-winning novelist-naturally, there was a great deal of anticipation a round Kiran Desai's new, nearly 700-page doorstopper The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. And yet, the book has exceeded those high hopes in style, earning rave reviews around the globe and a place on the 2025 Booker shortlist.

Set mostly between 1996 and 2002, the novel's two central characters Sonia and Sunny are both Indian immigrants living in the United States. When they were college students, their respective grandfathers (who're neighbours in Allahabad) launched an unsuccessful matchmaking attempt between the two youngsters. Sonia gets involved with an abusive, controlling older artist called Illan while Sunny starts a relationship with Ulla, who's more than a little defensive about her rural origins and her white, Republican parents.

Many years later, a fortuitous encounter on an Indian train offers Sonia and Sunny a second chance at love-but can they overcome their personal and generational traumas, to say nothing of the obstacles put up by their respective families? The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a slow-burning epic, a novel that never shies away from tackling big ideas. Globalization, xenophobia, America's 'war on terror'-all of these themes are beautifully depicted in the novel.

Through Sonia's work as a budding writer of fiction and Sunny's job as a journalist, Desai also offers her thoughts on India's decade of economic reform in the 1990s, as well as the subcontinent's brutal histories of communal strife and feudal relations.