Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a stunning epic about the scions of two well-to-do Indian families who, in the mid-1990s, have been groomed to go abroad, find their fortunes and marry respectably (which, at least for Sunny’s meddling mother, means marrying white). Sonia is an aspiring writer who is prone to sadness, and when she meets a tortured painter, she is swept up into his world of art, opulence and control. Sunny, whose name is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on his demeanor, is a graveyard-shift news reporter plagued with loneliness even in his relationship with Ulla, a white American woman he loves but hides from his family.
After separate tumultuous lives and disastrous relationships in the United States, Sunny and Sonia find themselves back in Delhi as two heartbroken strangers who feel lost in their birthplace. Before long, they discover that the societal expectations of India’s elite are just as perilous as the lives they left behind. Overbearing parents, cultural norms that glorify non-Indianness and, in Sonia’s case, the dangers of traveling alone as a single woman threaten the young adults’ very existence. Through these struggles, Desai explores how contemporary Indian society still suffers from the lingering effects of colonialism, racism, respectability politics and the caste system, all of which Sonia and Sunny must navigate in order to find themselves and, eventually, the love they deserve.
In this third novel nearly two decades in the making, Desai solidifies her place as a storyteller for the ages. Her ability to interweave the angst of young adulthood with the histories of the nations that shape our contemporary identities is second to none. While The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is indeed a tale about two beautiful but broken people who often find themselves in equally beautiful locales, it is also about what it means to be Indian in a world where even the people who raised you define success as assimilating into something else. As such, there is much more at stake than romance. With every page, and in every exquisite sentence, Desai asks: What does it mean to find yourself? Who owns the story of your identity? And in the event that you lose track of your own plot, how do you get the story back?
Read our interview with Kiran Desai about The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.