Book Review: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, New York, © 2025.

I have just finished reading.  Knowing I wanted to write this review, this morning, while waiting my turn in the ophthalmologist's exam room, I read the NYT's glowing review on my phone.  Then I read some of the 81 commenters mixed reviews.  Some abandoned the book almost from the start, others read through but did not like it and, finally, there were those who loved it.  Regardless of the category commenters fell into, many made interesting and insightful observations.  The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that kind of book.

Full disclosure, I have no particular literary expertise that credentials me to write this review.  I'm much more comfortable reviewing field guides and the like—although some might argue that I have no particular expertise there either.  What I do have is that I am a reader who loved this book.  I knew that I wanted to read it as soon as it began to hit the reviews and the best book lists.  For me, reviews and high-praise alone are not necessarily a reason to decide whether or not to read a book.  But I knew this was a book about Indians living in the United States and in India.  This juxtaposition, or if you prefer, duality is interesting to me.  As an American healthcare professional I have known, quite well, a few Indians in my day.  This association was one of the most satisfying privileges I enjoyed in my working life.  I learned about Indians living in the United States as well as how different is India.  Some of my learning came from shared communication, and some by observation.  I twice found the opportunity to visit India—first in the north, then in the south.  The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny confirmed much of what I learned—almost by osmosis—the semipermeable membrane that occurs in unlikely relationships.

The book opens in a way that the reader may find completely conventional.  Sonia is an Indian student attending a prestigious, and fictious, liberal arts college during a Vermont winter.  Think Colby College.  The others students have gone home for an American holiday and she and two other international students remain behind; Sonia to work in the library.  She is lonely and admits this to her grandfather on calls home.  Her grandfather gets the idea to propose a meeting with Sonia and his friend's grandson (Sunny), who lives in New York City, to help ease Sonia's loneliness.  After all it could work out.  

From such a humble and relatively reasonable idea, the novel proceeds in a direction that readers, dare I say, will not predict.  Sonia is open to meeting Sunny, but does not have faith that the meeting will occur, when she meets an arrogant, eccentric and, we find out later, completely odd, unstable and controlling, artist thirty-two years her senior with whom she begins a passionate affair.  I found this affair implausible and distasteful.  Meanwhile, Sunny is in a relationship with a white, American woman which he hides from his family.  This relationship seems more probable, but there is conflict in it for both Sunny and his girlfriend, Ulla.  From these two unlikely threads the author, Kiran Desai, slowly over 670 pages, weaves together  Sonia's and Sunny's fantastical story. 

In the beginning it's hard to place when all of this is happening.  Then, as if giving clues, features from the early 90s reveal themselves.  There are no cell phones.  Sonia uses the college phone to speak with her family.  Computers are not mentioned even though Sonia is a student in the college's writing program.  She is able to afford a sublet apartment in a scruffy area of Brooklyn (DUMBO; Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), in 2026 a trendy area, on the meager salary of an art gallery docent.  Desai even spells out the acronym and the first time I learned what DUMBO stood for.  Then a significant way through the story, 9/11 happens. 

We meet their families; Sonia's is aspirationally middle-class and Sunny's is pretentiously wealthy, but corrupt.  We meet their house staffs, friends and neighbors and Sunny's school friend in India now a  medical student in Rochester, New York.  Through mostly Sunny's eyes, we learn about life for Indians in the United States and from both families in India, we learn about Indian lives in India.  Sonia straddles both countries.  The grandparents die off.  Sonia's mother leaves her father.  Sonia's father dies.  Sunny's grandfather dies and his corrupt uncles are murdered.  Sunny's mother schemes through it all.  Throughout all of this the mystical and the fantastical are embedded in the characters and in the story.

Kiran Desai does not go easy on either the Unites States or on India.  Through her characters and their lives and the choices they make, she reveals the sometimes harsh and sometimes comical reality of both countries and cultures that I found to be completely believable.  Remarkably, Venice makes a consequential appearance in the book, as does a beach resort in Mexico.  Many readers seemed to quibble with the length of the book, thinking it should have been much shorter and that Desai would have benefitted from a strict editor.  I am a slow reader but I didn't struggle with the length.  Page by page I felt the story was always moving forward and that it was being told in the way that people, over years, actually live their lives.  I also appreciated Desai's often completely unique way of describing the features of her characters.   

I am writing this at the beginning of March and it turns out to be only my third book read in 2026.  The first was a memoir titled Rabbit Heart by Kristine S. Ervin that I had very mixed feelings about.  The second was The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by John U. Bacon, which I was unable to put down.   Other than this I have read many essays.  When one is a slow reader, as I am, essays can fill the reader's void without occupying the time needed for longer books.  Nevertheless, I feel comfortable writing here that The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will be the best novel I read all year.  The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize and made the top 10 of many American year-end lists for best books.  I recently purchased Desai's 2006 Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss, but after reading The Loneliness ... I will make my next reading non-fiction.  The Inheritance of Loss will wait, all the better for savoring The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. 

Spoiler alert:  do not read further if you do not want to know.

Yes, in the end, Sonia and Sunny do fully connect, but not in a way that will leave you deeply satisfied.  More in a way to leave you questioning and will confirm how challenging such relationships are.  The prose is astonishingly beautiful.