A friend who is a discerning reader raved to me about Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. "What she does is amazing," she said. "It's one of the best books I've read in years."
Given that kind of praise, you can be sure I quickly went looking for it. Took me a while to get it: I always turn to libraries first, and even though the libraries I belong to have 30 copies among them, I had to wait three and a half months before my turn to read the book came up.
Obviously, reviews, word of mouth, and the fact that the book made many "best of 2025" lists has led to lots of people seek it out. However, I think the nearly 700-page novel, while good, is not as stupendous as all that.
It tell the stories of two young Indian people from good families from Delhi who have been sent to study in the US in the 1990s. Sonia finds herself in a small New England town studying literature at an liberal arts college and struggling with cold and loneliness. Sunny, a little older, has got a master's in journalism and has found a job on the night shift at Associated Press. Without their knowledge, family members ineptly try to arrange a marriage between them, but the attempt comically falls apart without either of them being aware of what is going on. Sonia becomes involved with brilliant older artist who essentially enslaves her, and from whom she tries to escape throughout the book. Sunny ultimately rescues her, but it takes hundreds of pages, a lot of magic realism, some brilliant descriptions of India, Mexico, Venice, and New York, before we are given a small glimmer of hope that the pair won't be lonely any more.
Desai reportedly spent 20 years working on the book, and it's clear that she struggled to shoe-horn tons of experience into her story. There are moments which are wonderful, but there are others when this reader just wanted to get the end.
Verdict: a book to take on vacation if you expect to have a lot of down time. Don't expect to bowled over by it, however.
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