The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Shortlisted: The Booker Prize 2025
Published by Hamish Hamilton: 25 September 2025

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A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years – an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.

Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi, India, was educated in India, England and the United States, and now lives in New York

More about Kiran Desai

The writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny

The Booker Prize 2025 judges

Watch our films

A Q&A with Kiran Desai | The Booker Prize

Shazad Latif reads from The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai | The Booker Prize

What the judges said

‘This novel about Indians in America becomes one about westernised Indians rediscovering their country, and in some ways a novel about the Indian novel’s place in the world. Vast and immersive, the book enfolds a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story. We loved the way in which no detail, large or small, seems to escape Desai’s attention, every character (in a huge cast) feels fully realised, and the writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.’

What the critics said

Alex Clark, Guardian

‘This capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature’

Hassan Akram, Literary Review

‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling work of social portraiture stuffed with allusions to Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Although it is set between 1996 and 2001, its themes are urgently contemporary.’

Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

‘Crowded but never claustrophobic, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.’

Nalini Iyer, International Examiner

‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a deeply satisfying, profoundly moving, witty, and occasionally heart-rending novel that explores immigration; alienation; the relationship between art, the artist, and artistic subject; and the changing role of women in contemporary India.’

Somak Ghoshal, Mint

‘The prose takes a while to warm up, but when it does, it flows like a mountain stream, uninhibited even when faced with obstacles. Finally, there are many digressions along the way, often veering into quasi-occult or spooky zones—but it remains a page-turner till the end, serious and funny in turn, a chameleon-like entity of warmth and chill, where love is impossible to separate from hurt.’