Kiran Desai’s long-awaited new novel THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY, an epic love story about two young people torn between family, tradition and their own desires, will be published by Penguin Random House (PRH) in September 2025. This is Desai’s first novel since her beloved bestseller The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.
Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, will publish the book in print and digital formats in India in September 2025. Penguin Random House imprints will publish the novel in several territories, including Hogarth in the United States; Hamish Hamilton in the United Kingdom; Knopf in Canada; Salamandra in Spain; and Campanhia das Letras in Brazil. All rights were acquired from Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two Indians in the United States navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
‘I am immensely grateful Sunny and Sonia have found such a welcoming home at PRH, and that I have the privilege of working with such talented and enthusiastic teams,’ says author Kiran Desai. ‘Using the comic lens of an endlessly unresolved romance between two modern Indians, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny examines Western and Eastern notions and manifestations of love and solitude as they play out across the geographical and emotional terrain of today’s globalised world. I think only a novel can get at the raw truth regarding what people are privately thinking and negotiating.’
Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief and Vice-President of the imprints Hamish Hamilton, Allen Lane, Viking, Penguin and Penguin Classics at Penguin Random House India, says, ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny dazzles with its ambition—intimate in its details, epic in its reach. Balancing critique with compassion and sentiment with intellect, it slices through the polite façades of privilege to expose the weight of familial love, the violence of class and the ache of displacement. At the same time, it is sharp, funny, tragic and endlessly surprising. Desai makes it look effortless, but this is a monumental achievement, and we are so proud to bring it home.’
Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in India, she came to the US when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City.