Kiran Desai Returns To Booker Prize Spotlight With Her Latest Novel

Photo: Booker Prize

India-West News Desk

NEW YORK, NY — Nearly two decades after she became the toast of the literary world with ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, Kiran Desai has returned to the Booker Prize spotlight. Her latest novel, ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, has been shortlisted for the 2025 award, reaffirming her place as one of India’s most influential voices in global literature.

Born in New Delhi and educated across India, England, and the United States, Desai has long embodied the fluid, transnational identity that shapes much of her fiction. She now lives in New York, but her storytelling remains deeply rooted in the complexities of India, its diaspora, and the tensions of modernity.

Her Booker-nominated novel traces the intertwined lives of two young Indians, Sonia and Sunny, whose families once attempted to arrange their union. Their story unfolds between India and the United States — Sonia returns home from Vermont after a troubling entanglement with an artist, while Sunny, a journalist in New York, struggles to escape family conflict. Together, they confront questions of love, belonging, and the weight of history.

Critics have called the book Desai’s most ambitious work yet: a sweeping tale that fuses family saga, love story, and philosophical meditation on the fractures of class, country, and generation.

For India, Desai’s shortlisting is part of a landmark literary year. Should she win, it would complete an unprecedented sweep of all 2025 Booker honors by Indian writers, following Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi’s triumph earlier this year with the International Booker Prize for ‘Heart Lamp’.

The Booker shortlist itself highlights global narratives stretching from Hungary to Japan and Venice to England. Yet Desai’s entry carries special resonance: a writer who first won acclaim in 1998 with ‘Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard’, crowned with the Booker in 2006, and later named by The Economic Times as one of the most influential global Indian women.

With ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, Desai brings her career full circle, once again placing Indian stories — messy, tender, and universal — at the heart of world literature.

The other shortlisted titles reflect the prize’s international scope. David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ follows a man’s rags-to-riches drift from a Central European housing estate to the mansions of London’s elite; Andrew Miller’s ‘The Map of Desire’ explores history and reinvention in England’s West Country; Susan Choi’s ‘Empire of Glass’ and Katie Kitamura’s ‘Deep City’ bring psychological intensity to stories set between Japan, Venice, and New York; while Ben Markovits’s ‘The Upright Path’ offers a sharp study of rootless characters navigating dislocation. Together, the six books span continents and themes of belonging, exile, and transformation.