Point of return

In a world obsessed with perpetual productivity and performative presence, Kiran Desai's re-emergence feels like a rare celestial event. The Booker Prize-winning author speaks to MEGHNA PANT about why she disappeared for two decades at the zenith of her career.

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WHAT DOES IT mean to vanish? Not metaphorically, but in the brutal, everyday sense: no Twitter threads, no TED talks, no think pieces on the publishing industry, no lit-world sightings.

Just a woman at her desk with a dying laptop and a half-boiled idea, showing up to the page every day for two decades. For most writers, this would be career suicide. For Kiran Desai, it is craft in its purest form.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai’s third novel, comes 20 years after the Booker Prizewinning The Inheritance of Loss, and nearly 30 since her debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Her latest is not thunderous like Loss, nor whimsical like Hullabaloo. It is quiet and domestic; minor in scale but massive in depth. A novel—already long-listed for the Booker Prize 2025 even before its release—where the real magic is not in levitating babas or a border-crossing tragedy, but in the ghosts that occupy Delhi basements, the ache of an unanswered phone call and the stale rotis of diasporic longing.