Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her previous novels Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998), set in India of her childhood- born in Delhi, The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize. 

This tale is about Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, whose once-wealthy families connected through their grandparents, are part of the first generation of young Indians to experience migration, travel and life outside a rigid hierarchy, caught in between tradition and modernity, between pleasing parents and pleasing themselves. They fall in love, but are soon parted by self-doubt, pride and family meddling.  Their fates intersect and diverge across continents and years- an epic of love and family. Sonia and Sunny don’t meet in person until 200 pages. When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they were captivated,  especially Sunny is entranced by a young woman with a face “like a leopard”, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them.

Sonia, graduated from American college and an aspiring fiction novelist who recently completed her studies in Vermont, has returned to her family in India. Her fear that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, also graduated from American college, a struggling journalist at the Associated Press, researching fantastical human interest stories from India, resettled in New York City, attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront many alienations of our modern world.

Their previous relationships Sunny with an American student and Sonia with an older, narcissistic artist, Ilan, who controls Sonia, then abandons her – taking with him an amulet deity that had belonged to her mysterious German grandfather. The loss of the protective talisman haunts Sonia, who imagines that a giant ghost dog pursues her, in a novel that plays with tropes. Sonia’s adored Papa, whom her mother recently left, is preposterously vain yet with enormous pathos; and Sunny’s widowed yet spiteful mother Babita is a true Grande Dame, both enliven and give ballast to their respective children angst.

Sunny’s dodgy uncles in Delhi, in anti-Muslim riots, in a sexual assault on Sonia, while travelling alone. Sunny’s rivalrous best friend Satya, a “cartoon buffoon”, insists Sunny accompany him on his honeymoon, only to crossly send him away when the bride finds Sunny more amenable than her new husband.

Sonia searching for her authentic self as a write thinks “ if she continued to write multiple narratives until the truth of something she wrote became apparent.. wouldn’t in every story become equivalent to every other story?”

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Hamish Hamilton, £25/ Hogarth $32, 688 pages.