Kiran Desai will release her first book in almost two decades next year, the Associated Press reports.
Hogarth will publish the author’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny in the fall. The Penguin Random House imprint describes the book as “the spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.”
Desai made her literary debut in 1998 with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, about an Indian man who takes up residence in a fruit tree. She followed that up six years later with The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny will follow the two title characters, young people living in Vermont and Brooklyn, respectively, who are dealing with loneliness and alienation.
“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 globalized world," Desai said in a statement to the AP. "I think only a novel can get at the raw truth regarding what people are privately thinking and negotiating.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is slated for publication on Sept. 23, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
