BOOK REVIEW: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

I just (finally) finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, short-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize. A good short description comes from the book jacket: “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.”

I enjoy sweeping, inter-generational family sagas in general, but this one got to be too much. The smallest part of the novel was the slow-motion love story between Sonia and Sunny. They are from the youngest of three generations covered in the book. The contemporary generation. They are from wealthy, higher-caste Indian families and are sent to the U.S. for college in order to make something of themselves and to bring prestige to their families. But in the U.S., they are lonely and unable to form healthy relationships, unable to find the lucrative careers that their families expect. Eventually, they have to find their way to each other, back in India.

However, this is not really their love story as much as it is the story of their relationships with their parents, their country, and their culture. The book takes the reader through the backstories and ongoing stories of family members and friends. And while it was interesting at first, I got bogged down in a narrative that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The themes of alienation and dysfunctional families are not favorites of mine, and these themes seemed to swallow up all the others. The characters were all largely unhappy, unfulfilled, and selfish, which, although sadly realistic, made it difficult to sympathize with their plights. Eventually, in order to draw the disparate threads back together, it became necessary to rely on magical realism, and I’m not a magical realism fan. 

But this is a novel to read for the beauty of its language, not the plot or interwoven themes. And the language is beautiful. Mostly. The descriptions of setting and the deep psychological dives were compelling enough to keep me reading. But even that got to be too much. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, this novel showcases its lovely prose using lists. Lots of long lists. Inevitably, I’d find myself skimming.  

The book has earned a lot of praise, and it is certainly ambitious and sweeping. But it just wasn’t the right book for me.