The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

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The new novel from Kiran Desai, Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an epic story of two young people who become lost, strangers to themselves. After leaving India to study in the USA, Sonia is annihilated by an older lover, the famous painter Ilan (and by wider forces of family expectation, misogyny and alienation), while Sunny, seeking 'success' in New York City , finds himself lost between cultures. He too suffers from misguided family expectations, and gradually loses his sense of self. As their stories cross and merge and migrate and reconnect, in the US and India, we see how both need to find themselves anew, and we root for them - flawed and complex as they are - while they strive to do so. The novel brilliantly depicts the collision between east and west, young and old, self and family, caste and freedom, exile and belonging - and all the splintered, myriad cultures that coexist not always harmoniously in both the US and India. We see the legacy of colonialism again - the wish to have successful children in America; and the grief of losing those children to another continent and culture. But above all, the novel examines the essential loneliness of the human condition, and the ways in which love makes life, not just possible, but radiant.

Author Bio

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, was educated in India, England and the United States, and now lives in New York. She is the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Book Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.