Kiran Desai’s lexicon of loneliness and a new novel

Kiran Desai's upcoming novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, explores loneliness, reflecting on her writing process and influences, including her mother Anita Desai.

Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai’s third book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is slated for release in 2025. The Indian-born American author has been working on this novel studiously for two decades, which seems a long time even for a 700-page tome.

Talking at the Bangalore Literature Festival last week, Desai spoke candidly about how she worked every day of the week, and “vanished into an ocean of stories, where real life becomes ghost-like and books become real life, like in a way the past becomes more vivid than the present. It was a challenge to put together the book lying in pieces”.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a lexicon of loneliness or solitude, said Desai, adding that it is not just the critical parts of being alone but also the beautiful and the spiritual sides of it. “A lot of readers will understand the global epidemic of loneliness; you shouldn’t be afraid to be personal about it. In the midst of brokenness, a window opens to invention.”

Desai was 24 when her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was published in 1998. A comic satire, it revolved around a dreamy, introspective young man torn between his filial obligations and a desire to be left alone.

This book, she admitted, was simple, written very quickly and taught her how much she loved writing although it didn’t capture the darker parts of her work. “I think I was just trying to recover a childhood version of something of India I knew I was losing,” she said.

Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Man Booker Prize “was a harder book and took me a while to write”, she continued. The novel tells of a 1980s rebellion by the ethnic Nepalese in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong.

Desai doesn’t venture out much, yet writes about everything around her. Her writing process is slow, and with characteristic candour, she admitted at the Festival that she writes in a “jigsaw puzzle way” that takes a long time to construct her work. She noted that sometimes one has to continue working without perspectives and maintain an ant-like discipline to keep going.