“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Kiran Desai‘s 2025 novel, is a sprawling, multi-generational family saga that plays out across four continents in the late 1990s.
At heart, it is the love story of two young Indian writers, both struggling with isolation and social dislocation, who are inexorably drawn back together, even as family and geography conspire to pull them apart.
Along the way, Desai explores themes of alienation, class and cultural hierarchy, and the lives we inherit versus those we make for ourselves.
Here & Now‘s Indira Lakshmanan speaks with Desai about her epic second novel and the power of solitude.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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