In Conversation With ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ Author, Kiran Desai
By Rida BilgramiWhen Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, first found me, I was on the cusp of a new decade of my life. It was winter in Boston, where I was beginning a semester’s long haul. I wanted to read fiction that would work through me, move me, and ask me questions.
Nearly two decades later I encountered Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and descended into it for a week; 700 pages in I was not ready to step out of the world of Desai’s creation. It felt like floating in the magic of words, yet grounded by the sweep of its epic world-building. Desai went on to win the Booker Prize for Literature for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006 and since then has been at work on her third novel set between the mid-90s and the early 2000s that drifts between the U.S and India – the two countries she calls home.
At the start of the novel Sonia, a liberal arts college student and aspiring young writer from Delhi, tries to cure her loneliness in forlorn Vermont by beginning a relationship with Ilan, a narcissistic painter several decades her elder. The narrative cuts between Sonia and the novel’s other titular character, Sunny Bhatia, who traces his roots to Allahabad and Delhi and works as a copy-editor for the Associated Press in New York City. He is living in a gentrified Brooklyn neighbourhood with his girlfriend Ulla, the daughter of Republicans from Kansas unbeknownst to his meddling mother Babita, a status-obsessed widow who lives in Delhi. Sonia and Sunny eventually meet in India and become besotted with each other, after a failed attempt by their respective grandfathers to arrange their match. The novel has a muscularity and embraces a broad range of generational perspectives through which Desai uncovers the fault lines of shared social and political life, myriad and web-like. Her confrontations with the precarities of race, gender, and class convey the beauty and devastation inherent in the politics of intimacy. Most strikingly, Desai’s portrayal of the immigrant experience eschews both romanticisation and stereotype. Her characters wrestle with issues such as visa complications, family obligations and the delicate navigation between individual and collective identity.
Desai’s prose moves elegantly between a multitude of narrative tones: contemplative, critical, witty, and earnest, but doesn’t lose coherence. Her writing is especially adept at weaving a tapestry of loneliness as both a universal condition and how it manifests through dislocation. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is rarely burdened by its capaciousness. This 2025 Booker Prize shortlisted book is in many ways a novel of ideas and while some of the passages can feel digressive, they are indicative of a brilliant mind at work. Desai’s writing remains vivid and alive, and the voice is always incisive, humorous and compassionate.
In early September, Desai and I discussed the making of this monumental novel, the grammar of loneliness, and how swimming mirrors the writing process.
Rida Bilgrami: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has been two decades in the making. What was it like to craft a story over this span of time and put it out into the world after it’s been something so integral to your life?
Kiran Desai: With my last novel Inheritance of Loss, I was ready to let it go. Maybe because it was such a harsh book. This time I felt very close to the characters and I disappeared into their lives. It’s been two decades of living with these two families, and I really don’t quite know what to do with myself now that I’ve finished it. I find my brain just curling around, trying to think of what new project I should involve myself in. I really do miss spending time with these characters, especially Sonia’s father and aunt and Sunny’s mother Babita.
RB: Did this novel start with the seed of a plot or with the characters?
KD: I had a pressing desire to write a novel about global loneliness, which is as ubiquitous as water. Like water it seems to morph into many different forms and shapes. I had the idea of thinking about all the rifts of the modern world from the huge class disparities to distrust between races to the urban and rural divide as forms of loneliness. I was also interested in having the lens of a love story, which is a salve to loneliness, in order to examine loneliness.
How Sunny and Sonia’s trajectories would collide was plotted much later. I wrote the stories of many of the characters separately until I could see how their stories might intersect. Initially I followed the stories of some of the other characters for far too many pages. In fact I had a 5000-page manuscript at one point. There were passages of Sunny living with different roommates, of spending a youthful life in New York City, where you meet and live with all kinds of people with whom you have nothing in common and also long passages about his girlfriend Ulla. I also wrote a much longer version of Sonia’s relationship with Ilan, which I had to take out because he was overtaking the whole novel.
RB: The way you’ve developed the characters, it’s impossible not to feel a certain degree of kinship with many of them. They are so fully realised and could be composites of people in my own family. While I may not always love them, I have compassion for their actions and choices. In the process of writing this book, did the characters change for you?
KD: Some of the characters are based on people in my own life. Sonia’s elderly aunt is somewhat based on my aunt who I adored. She was a Truman Capote-like character – that aunt in a Christmas story. The figure of Sonia’s German grandfather interested me immensely because I had a German grandmother who I never knew. She died when I was a baby. The ‘not knowing’ has always made me extremely curious. She came to India from Germany in the 1920s and went back only once before World War II. I was interested in writing about European history in the 30s and 40s, but that time period cannot be a small part of a novel so I decided to cut it out. I was following many different thoughts, but I was interested in the turn of the millennium and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and how the conversations were beginning to change in the privacy of people’s living rooms.
What really shifted in the writing process was that I ended up spending a lot of time with Sonia and Sunny thinking about them as writers. Sunny, I knew he would be a journalist early on and I wanted to talk about how the news morphs from country to country as it travels, just as people do. But with Sonia, I had not expected to write a portrait of an artist as a young woman. That came later on.
RB: Does continuing to write books with such a vast and ambitious scale interest you?
KD: No, I do not plan to work on this scale again. This novel was a particular enterprise because I realised that I would not be able to write about India this way again. My father died in 2008, and I was working on this book at that time. I knew that after he was gone, I would no longer be going home. I still have close family members in India, but the family home has been sold so I would not be going home in the same way. India’s transforming into a new country and one that I would not be capable of writing about. Fear has overtaken India, and it is corrosive. People do not speak out in public and once fear is injected into a society that’s almost the end. The other reason for working at this scale was that the memories of my grandparents were still alive, and I knew that they would be more and more faint as time passed so I wanted to capture elements of those memories.
RB: Through a wider cast of ancillary, yet significant characters you explored how a cross-section of India in the decade post-liberalisation is impacted by economic disparities, the rising tide of religious nationalism, and communal fractures. Did you set out to undertake a historical and sociological inquiry through the medium of the novel?
KD: I didn’t think in those terms exactly. I was thinking more about the different rifts in society, and was interested in who owns the story, who tells the story and who is captured by whose gaze. In that way, yes, I was writing about religious minorities in India. In my years growing up in India my parents had friends from all parts of society who frequently spent time in our living room. I realise, in retrospect, that it was a precious living room, and these were very precious people. India, as a writing landscape, was also fantastic. It was writing with intimacy, knowledge and affection about people who come from other worlds. I think of writers like Salman Rushdie, painters like M. F. Hussain or filmmakers like Ismail Merchant – all of these people from minority communities who could access Hindu mythology, they could write about it, they could paint it. I have said this before that when we fight for equal rights for minorities, for a secular nation, we are, in fact, also fighting for a literary landscape.
RB: As you have mentioned the novel explores loneliness in a much more expansive sense. While you explore the loneliness that is inherent in dislocation, a key thread is the relationship that both Sonia and Sunny have to self-discovery, as they drift through continents alone and together. Their idea of themselves is also shaped by their past intimate relationships – Sonia’s with a much older European artist and Sunny’s with a woman from Kansas. What interests you as a storyteller in exploring the loneliness in intimate relationships that have power imbalances – whether on the basis of age, race, class and citizenship?
KD: Exploring the loneliness in intimate relationships is the biggest challenge of all but that’s the place of fiction – to articulate the very intimate places that no one ever gets to see and the challenge of putting that across in an honest way. It feels very revealing. As an author it puts me in a vulnerable place as well and yet I think that is the most important space for art and for fiction. Writing Inheritance of Loss was relatively easier because I didn’t go to that place. The tempestuous relationship between Ilan and Sonia and the relationship between Sonia’s parents were the most difficult parts of the book to write but they’re also the parts I wanted to write the most. I was trying to make, as all writers do, this comparison between how the power divide works in the personal sphere and also outside in the world on a political level.
RB: Loneliness finds a spiritual dimension in the novel where several women such as Mama, Ferooza, Babita, Mina Foi, and even Sonia either intentionally or through circumstance find themselves deviating from the standard scripts of what Indian womanhood is supposed to look like. I was struck by how you depicted solitary living for women in middle age as a hard-won safe space but not necessarily a romanticised ideal. Could you elaborate on how you achieved that balance?
KD: I wanted to write about all the different ways solitude or loneliness can feel, and for Sonia’s mother, as you said, it feels like sustenance, and it feels like the peace that came after the war. She also doesn’t feel like she can make another choice. She had to allow her husband his pride in order for her to be able to leave. That meant that she couldn’t choose a completely new existence. And she tells her daughter that there are worse things than loneliness at a certain point, it could mean abiding peace, which is a harsh thing for a mother to tell her daughter. And yet Sonia also realises that loneliness can in some ways also mean an absence of fear. Babita, on the other hand, is so greedy for a world she feels she’s being cheated out of. I feel all those different things as I live and travel alone. This reflects my own understanding of solitude and loneliness and all its different forms. I also wanted to consider solitude as a necessary condition for self-reinvention – when other people are not telling you who you are.
RB: Relatedly, I love the exchange between Albana, a bartender from Albania and Sunny. She tells him: “Unwatched solitude was not loneliness, but a state of being that was rich and nourishing, naturally sustaining and as precious as sunlight dangling in a quiet room after the war is over.”
KD: When Sunny has that exchange with the Albana, he doesn’t know the loneliness that comes from constant surveillance, which is what’s happening to us now in India and the United States and perhaps some other places too. Coming from Albania she had lived through that reality.
RB: The novel has a striking sense of place as its own complex character; New York and its particular neighbourhoods feature prominently as do Delhi, Goa, Allahabad, Venice and a fishing village in Colima, Mexico. These places are not just backdrops but their history and geography is elemental to the narrative. How do the different cities you’ve called home or spent time in inform how you work and what you create?
KD: I always keep diaries wherever I am. The last few years I haven’t been able to do so as I was so immersed in completing this novel and I’m tormented by the fact that all this wonderful material just went under the bridge. While keeping the diaries I was documenting material, which meant in every place I spent time, I was writing details of the landscape, snatches of conversation because if you don’t capture it in the moment, it’s very difficult to recreate in memory. The material built it up over the years and I realised what kind of book I wanted to write.
All the places in the novel are cities I’ve been in and know at least to the degree I’ve written about them: The landscape in Mexico is based on a village I used to spend time in writing. Allahabad is where my grandparents lived. Delhi is where my father lived and where I grew up. The neighbourhoods in New York City are ones I have lived in.
RB: Your writing feels so intricate on a visual level. The precision in the details is that of a miniaturist. One such example is when you describe a bottle of filtered water placed on coasters imprinted with botanical illustration of tulips. I would love for you to say more about your methods of seeing and imagining and translating that into images on the page.
KD: That is also a result of the accumulation of immense material over time. You mention the tulips on the coaster, but there are millions of such observations. I used that one because when I would visit India it was so common to find old squash bottles that were being re-used as bottles of filtered water. Often the coasters would be brought back from a holiday to a European museum, which would indicate that you are in a prosperous household. By capturing and writing those precise details I wanted to create the exact mood of those homes.
RB: Sonia and Sunny are both writers and committed readers. The novel is replete with literary references from the Western canon such as Hemingway and Nabakov and South Asian literary greats such as Tagore and Faiz. How much of your own artistic and literary influences inspired the crafting of the intellectual life of your characters?
KD: Very much so. I don’t know what leads you to the books that are going to help you. It feels almost spooky that you pick up books that have to do with what you’re trying to write. While writing the novel I was reading Franz Kafka’s The Castle, which Sonia’s mother is reading on her honeymoon. There is a beautiful opening where the travellers are on a bridge, looking up and there is a castle up there, but it’s obscured in the thick swirl of snow. It almost feels like a metaphor for writing a novel. You can sense something there but you’re not sure what it’s going to look like. And then there is a long journey of the traveler trying to get to the castle, and of course he only arrives when he’s dead. I immediately began to think of characters, like Sonia trying to write a book. Similarly with the novel Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, which is a book created out of distances, and a central mystery that’s never revealed. So yes absolutely, several of the books I mention in the novel were integral to my own creative process.
RB: You mentioned earlier in our conversation that you were interested in exploring loneliness as ubiquitous as water. There is a lot of swimming and water bodies in the novel. How would you define your own relationship with water?
KD: I love to swim and writing this novel book often felt like I was swimming in words. However, I don’t get to swim very often because I live in New York and in a neighbourhood where there’s not easy access to a swimming pool. An idyllic writer’s life is to be able to combine swimming and working. But that doesn’t happen very often for me.
RB: Does the act of swimming give you a sense of weightlessness in the world?
KD: Yes. It’s a sort of weightlessness and also a sense of mystery. You have no idea what is in the water with you when you are swimming in the ocean. And I would go out and swim in Mexico in this little village where I was writing. The ocean was full of creatures – some very beautiful ones such as dolphins and pelicans but also dangerous creatures like stingrays and snakes, because it was a very deep bay in the Pacific. I would swim out and have no idea what was swimming close to me. Because of that mystery, I often felt as if it was my novel swimming underneath me. I couldn’t see the shape of it but there was a presence. Those were magical moments that meant a lot to me artistically. I realise as I’m talking to you that it’s important for me to be out in the world a little bit again.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai will be published on 25th September 2025 (Hamish Hamilton). Desai will be appearing at Southbank Centre on 5th October and at Manchester Literature Festival on 7th October.
Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Read more of Rida’s work on Something Curated here.
Header image by M. Sharkey.