The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever

Ann Patchett

Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present

Hisham Matar

A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart

Mohsin Hamid

A novel from Kiran Desai is always going to be an event, but The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will be seismic, trust me. Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers

Junot Díaz

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is both epic and intimate. This is a story of two young people, and a story of families and belonging. That Kiran Desai also finds a way to deftly thread unflinching questions about the imagination and creativity through these immersive pages is brilliant evidence of her formidable and incomparable gifts as a writer. What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down

Maaza Mengiste

A masterpiece . . . Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close . . . magnificent

Kirkus (starred review)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough

Andrew Sean Greer

I had been dying to read a gorgeously written, sweeping novel like this. Desai’s tale—devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic—grapples with the complexities of artistic ambition, migration, loss, love, and confronts a central question: What does it mean to belong? How does one reach ever toward the future when haunted by the past? This poignant novel—rich with culture, heartbreak, and hope—was an unmitigated joy to read

Khaled Hosseini

Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend

Lauren Groff

A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again

Sandra Cisneros

A grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose . . . [a] sheer delight!

Namwali Serpell

A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age

Publishers Weekly

A sprawling epic love story that has consumed her life for two decades . . . far and away Desai’s most ambitious novel . . . it spans continents and unearths decades of family history, exploring the effects of globalization, the legacy of colonialism and partition in India, and the slippery, transmutable nature of identity

Alexandra Alter, New York Times

A dazzling epic . . . this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature . . . immensely entertaining

Alex Clark, Guardian

Kiran Desai’s long-awaited third novel is an utter triumph . . . it’s one of the strongest contenders on this year’s Booker longlist . . . Sentence by sentence, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes for blissful reading . . . Desai has managed some literary alchemy. On the surface, she has written a believable but still cute will-they-won’t-they romance . . . but she also incorporates elements of magical realism . . . and through all that, Desai uses the struggle of her two writer protagonists to acknowledge, embrace and then undercut various tropes and cliches that Western readers have come to expect from her, and her compatriots

Lucy Scholes, Daily Telegraph (5 stars)

A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel. [It is] among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people

Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

This novel is grand in sweep yet satisfyingly intimate

Malcolm Forbes, Economist

Desai's [novel] is so much more than a love story, exploring themes of race, class, American individualism, modern - day alienation, toxic entanglements and the fraught but fundamental need to forge connection. Steadily accruing emotional heft, it's entertaining, surprising, profound, and moving. Magnificent

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Desai’s epic, Booker-longlisted love story wears its profundity lightly, blending bold ideas and intimate drama to sparkling effect

Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

An epic romance . . . a consistently surprising saga jam-packed with incident . . . amongst it all, Desai finds time for nuanced send-ups of everything from the self-importance of a ritzy literary gala in New York to the machinations of the Indian marriage market, as well as poignant rumination on migrant experience

Anthony Cummins, Sunday Times

A magisterial achievement . . . Desai’s prose is meditative but the book is alive with detail . . . a sprawling work of social portraiture stuffed with allusions to Dikens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Hassan Akram, Literary Review

A vast masterpiece of a love story

Emily Rhodes, Spectator

It demands patient engagement and offers generous rewards in return . . . this oceanic novel . . . the tides of history run alongside the currents of chance and fate that shape the lives of Sonia and Sunny . . . The writing moves fluently between distinctive voices, fusing a minutely observed realism with swirling undercurrent of magical thinking . . . The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny overspills boundaries because it addresses an impossibly huge subject. Like India itself, it refuses to be contained within modest expectations

Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has the feel, and at nearly 700 pages, the size, of a multigenerational epic. For all the book’s great scope, though, no detail is too granular to escape Desai’s notice. Through the love story of its two main characters, Indians torn between America and home, the book explores and enacts the tension between two paths for Indian fiction, social realism and magical realism, and fuses them to original and enthralling effect

Chris Power, Guardian

A richly detailed, twisty saga with the grand feel of classical literature . . . The lovers and their families must contend with all manner of powerful forces: cultural alienation, distrust between nations, corruption and sexual violence. But there are some laughs here and there

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

Immersive and gently funny . . . Desai’s novel is an intricate portrait of an interconnected world

Justine Jordon, Guardian

Beautifully made, terrifically visual

Giles Cohen, Irish Times

A love story, surrealist mystery, study of identity and feat of metafiction . . . The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny? ?more than earns its buzz . . . It’s a starburst of a novel, dazzling and unforgettable . . . At nearly 700 pages, it is a long book but one that allows for the kind of intense, sumptuous immersion that can feel for the reader like being under a spell . . . Desai’s novel strives to capture nothing less than the fullness of human existence – its paradoxes, eccentricities and wonders – and at its most ambitious, the abyssal, often inexpressible devastation wrought by the loss of self . . . A love story spanning years of hurdles also demands an ending worthy of its journey. Desai delivers spectacularly

Yagnishsing Dawoor, Observer