Kiran Desai on her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted for Booker Prize 2025

The two most obvious facts about Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton), have to do with length — it is a book nearly 700 pages long, and nearly two decades in the writing. When I speak to Desai over Zoom, I begin by asking her about these two facts: or, rather, the relationship between them. Unlike so many long novels, Sonia and Sunny is not overstuffed with event. Its pace is lifelike: sometimes languorous, occasionally frenetic. Many thousands of pages were whittled down to the final 688.

“Each time I took out a strand,” says Desai, “I had to read the whole book again” to make sure “the pacing worked, the mood shifts worked.” The process was “intuitive”, rather than planned. This is a word that recurs in our conversation. Desai is not one of those architect-writers for whom a book is an achievement of willed design.

The writer (and Booker Prize judge) Chris Power has described Sonia and Sunny as exploring and enacting “the tension between two paths for Indian fiction, social realism and magical realism”. Desai accepts the characterisation (made more obvious by Sonia reading the realist classic Anna Karenina while Sunny reads Pedro Paramo, founding text of magical realism), but says that, unlike the novel she’s actually written, the one she had planned was “completely realistic”. She was wary, as Sonia is, of being accused of being yet another Indian selling the “hokey realm” of the fantastical. But she found that she couldn’t “encompass the entire human experience” while leaving out the element of the ‘hallucinatory’ and demonic.

Ocean of demons

Desai says that the ‘connective tissue’ of Sonia and Sunny, what gives the book ‘its underlying structure’, is the ‘unseen world’; the ‘esoteric’. The plot on the surface coexists with this “shadow world”, one that Sonia, in particular, wrestles with. Sonia and Sunny are both writers — one a novelist, the other a journalist — and Sonia comes close to being an authorial alter ego in the manner of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman. I am struck by the fact that, in a third-person novel, Sonia’s family members are referred to not by name but by their relation to her (‘Mama’, ‘Dadaji’, ‘Mina Foi’), while Sunny’s mother is Babita. It has the effect of making Sonia almost seem like the novel’s true narrator.

The idea of Sonia as alter ego was “a real battle” for Desai, who had no desire to write a ‘meta’ novel. But she concedes that, once she had given Sonia key elements of her own biography and made her a novelist, she began playing with, although never fully embracing, the idea of Sonia being the actual writer of this book.

Even so, Sonia’s dilemmas are Desai’s. She describes being interested in the kind of writer Sonia could become after overcoming the obstacles in her way. These obstacles are not, or not only, familiar writerly bugbears such as unimaginative publishers or indifferent readers. Quoting the Buddha, Desai says, “You have to go through the ocean of demons to get to the other side.” The demonic in Sonia’s life is represented by the cosmopolitan painter Ilan de Toorjen Foss.

Reviewers have described Ilan as an ‘art monster’. On the one hand, this is a pleasing reminder of literature’s enduring ability to enrich common speech (the phrase ‘art monster’ is from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation). As a description of Ilan, however, it strikes me as too prosaic. Desai agrees. Ilan is “totally a villain”, a personification of evil in the world. As children, she says, we encounter it in fairy tales, but later we’re told that novels should not deal in binaries such as good and evil. But then, “At a certain point — midway through life in my experience — we realise there is really evil, and those children’s stories were right all along,” says Desai. To fully admit the role of evil, and the demonic, Desai had, ultimately, to look beyond the constraints and conventions of the modern novel, and of modern psychology.

Uses for nostalgia

But there is plenty of the stuff of classic realism in Sonia and Sunny. Like those twin peaks of 19th century fiction — War and Peace and Middlemarch — it is really a historical novel, set a whole generation before its publication (it ends in 2002, a year in which most Indians alive today were young children or not yet born). It reconstructs, lovingly, if unsentimentally, a whole material and cultural world.

Desai says that she ended where she did for the simple reason of space: the book was already long enough. But she wanted, she says, to trace the arc between her grandparents’ generation — who gave up their faith and their Gujarati identity in favour of “a new sense of belonging, secular democracy” — and her own generation, where those values “were undone”. As a child visiting Allahabad from Delhi, Desai’s family had struck her “almost as provincial figures of fun”. By the time she wrote Sonia and Sunny, she was full of admiration for their journey from Gujarat to Allahabad (via England), and the way in which they embraced the culture — notably the food — of their new home.

“There are uses for nostalgia,” she says. “It is a dirty word but it shouldn’t be, so long as you [also] show the darker sides.” A novel, she says, “can work as a museum, and this novel feels like a museum of a past India”. She compares what she tried to do in Sonia and Sunny to the urge that led Nabokov to write Speak, Memory: a desire to preserve the precious past in words.

By ending when she does, Desai does not write of an India that she says she no longer really knows. Quoting John Grady from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, she says: “It’s a good country, but it ain’t my country anymore.” Grady goes on to say that he doesn’t know what his country is, and Desai has not traded one country for another: she is, rather, “a person without a country”. Having lived in the U.S. since she was a teenager, she confesses to being quite mystified by the hold India still has on her imagination. So we can hope that she isn’t finished with India just yet.

The writer is an author, most recently of ‘The Tiger’s Share’.