Love in the Time of Dislocation

Almost two decades after her Booker win, Kiran Desai returns with a novel that makes loneliness its loudest character

- By RAHUL SINGH

When Kiran Desai was promoting her 2006 Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss on a French news channel, she admitted that she was working on a book about “the loneliness of the globalised world, and the differences between the eastern and western notions of solitariness; all seen through a comic lens of a failed romance.”

Almost twenty years later, that book has finally arrived. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny marks Desai’s long-awaited return, with the book already longlisted for the Booker Prize this year, where she gives loneliness a global outlook.

The story begins in 1996 with a phone call. Sonia, studying in a small American town, tells her grandparents in Allahabad that she is lonely. Her parents, who stay in Delhi, are too busy feuding with each other to notice, so the family in Allahabad proposes a cure: introduce her to Sunny, the grandson of their neighbour who lives in America, for companionship. But fate keeps them both apart. Instead, Sonia and Sunny spiral into America’s allure and alienation, caught up in romance, the mixups, and obsessions that only deepen their solitude. This long tale of varied solitariness is that of a world destined to collapse. Wars, memories, and migration shape the lives of these characters, who are consumed by the fragile hope of reconciliation.