Breakaway Books

Authored by Kiran Desai; Published September 2025; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny almost fooled me into thinking that it was a love story, but after six hundred pages, I came to the conclusion that romance, in its traditional form, is not the aim of this novel.

The titular Sonia and Sunny are the two young scions of their families, both having left India for the US for educational and professional pursuits. When Sonia confesses to her parents that her American life is lonely, they half-heartedly attempt to set her up with Sunny, only to have it turned down by his parents with barely a thought. Thus starts an odyssey of discomfort between the two families, circling around each other and questioning how westernized their children have become. Sonia and Sunny fumble their way through various relationships only to finally find the companionship they crave with one another. Well, kind of.

I struggled with this novel. I spent the vast majority of it annoyed at the characters—all of them. Perhaps because they are staggeringly human (realistic?), there is not one who did not annoy me. At the same time, I was deeply moved by Sonia’s situation: her loneliness, her entrance into a relationship with an unsuitable man, her difficulty in escaping it. Sonia disappears into a strange fling with an older artist, absorbing so many of her boyfriend’s beliefs that she knows she has lost herself and cannot bring herself to leave when it becomes abusive. For much of the latter half of the novel, she is trying to recover, and while painful to read, it seems unfortunately realistic. I wanted to shake Sunny when he couldn’t understand Sonia’s plight and broke up with her for it. Of course, surveying all of the romantic relationships in the novel, not a single one stands out as particularly healthy or worth aspiring to. As far as love stories go, it’s depressing.

But it is also an immigrant story, albeit a nuanced one. Sonia and Sunny both appear to be profoundly ambivalent about the United States. Sunny and those around him spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether criticizing the US makes him look more or less western, and after the fourth or fifth back-and-forth on this topic, I had had enough. It’s not that the debate isn’t a worthy one; I just got bored of re-treading the same ground nearly verbatim. When the September 11th attacks occur in the novel, I was interested to see that nearly every character reacted differently, perhaps revealing a more honest look at their true view of the US. This one event was more illuminating to me than the rest of the meandering discussions of the novel. (And meandering discussions are a major feature.)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is, overall, a depressing read. It depicts certain truths about life as a migrant, life in relationships with other human beings, with startling and sometimes disturbing accuracy—but that’s not necessarily what I read fiction for.