Kiran Desai’s long-awaited new novel has landed

Two decades after winning the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai is back with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a global love story that immediately earned her a place back on the Booker shortlist.

Set in the 1990s, the novel follows two achingly lonely Indian expats in the US. Sonia, an aspiring writer in Vermont, and Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York, are each stuck in unhappy relationships when their well-meaning families attempt to arrange a marriage between them from afar.

Years later, they bump into each other on an overnight train from Delhi to Allahabad (now Prayagraj), and there’s an unexpected spark. Sonia is struck by Sunny’s “haughty nose and handsome bearing of an eagle or a nawab”.

Their story moves between India, Europe and the US, raising questions about how relationships form in an increasingly mobile world. As their paths continue to cross, the pair must come to terms with caste pressures and social expectations. Desai handles it all with controlled precision, giving each character a persuasive, fully realised interior life.

The title points straight to one of the book’s core ideas. Desai has been thinking about loneliness for a long time, and not just the romantic kind. There’s the loneliness that comes with moving countries, the loneliness of clashing cultures and a wider existential loneliness caused by political fractures and environmental destruction.

We first meet Sonia as a student and library worker in Vermont, trying to write while getting drawn into a relationship with Ilan de Toorjen Foss, the arrogant, aristocratic painter who seduces Sonia, 32 years his junior. The dynamic is manipulative and volatile, and it gradually pulls her away from the life she thought she was building. “Happiness,” an inner voice repeatedly tells her, “is for other people.”

Sunny, meanwhile, is working night shifts as a copy editor in New York and dealing with a different kind of isolation. He feels out of place in “this Brooklyn idyll of triumphant multiracial calm” and unsettled by the way he is categorised as a “person of colour” in a country where conversations about race are disquieting. Sharing a flat with his white girlfriend Ulla, the daughter of gun-owning Republicans from Kansas, only heightens his sense of alienation.

Back in Delhi, both families have plans of their own. Sonia’s grandfather hopes to settle an old debt by pairing her with the grandson of his long-time chess partner. Sunny’s mother, fixated on class and reputation, is convinced she knows exactly who he should end up with. From afar, these attempts to steer their futures only heighten the pressure and misunderstandings on both sides.

Desai began the book soon after her 2006 win, knowing everyone would be watching to see what she did next. Yet what she thought might take a few years turned into a far longer process. She settled into a pace that, almost without her noticing, she said, stretched on for 20 years.

She has brushed off comparisons to Romeo and Juliet, saying her real influences were books she had returned to repeatedly, including Anna Karenina, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Snow Country. Desai is most interested in how love works when people no longer grow up, study, work and marry within the same small circle. In her grandparents’ time, she said, you met partners within your community, class or religion, whereas today everything depends on chance — who you meet, where you meet and why one person crosses your path instead of another.

At almost 700 pages, the scale of the novel became clear only when Desai printed out her drafts and discovered she had generated almost 5,000 pages of material. She recalls being terrified at the sight.

But that’s one of the most delightful features of The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia — her attention to minor characters and incidental details. There’s an aunt who settles herself at night with a routine that is oddly soothing to watch, a chauffeur who delays everyone because he insists on collecting stray plastic bags along the road. Even the family’s old Ambassador car is treated with the sort of affection usually reserved for a family member.

Animals get the same treatment. A small squid clings stubbornly to the side of a fishing net in Venice, looking as confused as the tourists watching it, bandicoots help themselves to what’s in the kitchen and pigeons carry on with their business atop an air conditioner. Far from distracting the reader, these details show Desai’s keen eye for observation and her commitment to building a fully populated epic romance.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster of a book that pulls you into its world with ease. The length may seem intimidating, but the book is anything but slow. It’s an enthralling read that will keep you hooked, sometimes so profoundly that you’ll find yourself worrying it might end too soon.