The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a novel by the Indian-American writer Kiran Desai, published in 2025. Most of its events take place between 1996 and 2002.

Sonia has finished her studies in the mountains of Vermont and come back to her family in India, where she is trying to write and is troubled by a spell she believes an artist once cast on her. Sunny works as a journalist and has settled in New York to get away from a domineering mother and a family that is fighting among itself. Their grandparents had attempted to match them years before, which is the reason the two of them are awkward with each other when they meet by chance on a train, and the novel follows what they make of the meeting across the years that follow. Desai moves between India and America and between several sets of relatives, so the two of them are always being pulled back into the families they are trying to leave.

Desai won the Booker Prize for her earlier novel, The Inheritance of Loss, and this book appeared after a long gap and was one of the most widely reviewed novels of its year.