This is the fourth of six posts in which we examine the six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced on Monday, 10 November.

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The Long Game: Kiran Desai’s Craft, Lineage, and Epic Endeavour

As the daughter of the celebrated author Anita Desai, Kiran Desai inherited a literary lineage, yet she has forged a distinctive path entirely her own. Her writing career is defined not by speed but by depth, culminating in the publication of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel that is published nearly two decades after her Booker Prize-winning second book The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006). This latest work — a sprawling, 688-page epic — is not merely a tale of love and displacement but a philosophical treatise on modern alienation, cementing her reputation as one of the most ambitious and technically accomplished novelists of her generation.

Her three published novels — Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006), and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) — do not simply address the postcolonial condition; they map its progressive psychological consequences, moving from the internal absurdities of a small Indian town to the structural isolation felt across a hyper-connected, yet fundamentally fragmented, world.

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Kiran Desai’s biographical details are crucial to understanding the breadth and texture of her fiction. Born in New Delhi, India, in 1971, her life quickly established a transnational trajectory. She lived in India until the age of 15, moving then to England, before settling as a permanent resident in the United States, all while retaining her citizenship of India. This migratory existence, spanning three continents and multiple cultural codes, gave her the cosmopolitan outlook and dual cultural perspective that defines her work. She writes from the informed, complex position of an insider who is simultaneously an outsider, capable of observing both the minute details of an Indian household and the crushing anonymity of a New York City borough.

Her commitment to her craft is reflected in her rigorous academic training. Desai pursued creative writing at Bennington College, graduating in 1993, and subsequently earned two Master of Fine Arts degrees: one from Hollins University and another from Columbia University. This intensive, disciplined study provided the technical foundation for her acclaimed literary style. Early recognition arrived when her work was featured in The New Yorker and in Salman Rushdie’s influential 1997 anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork.

The Shadow and Light of Literary Lineage

The most famous element of Desai’s biography is her relationship with her mother, Anita Desai, a important writer in Indian English literature. Anita Desai is renowned for shifting the focus of the Indian novel from broad social-political narratives to the intense, internal landscape of the individual, particularly exploring the psychological depth and personal conflicts of women within the often rigid structures of post-independence Indian society.

Kiran Desai’s work enters into a profound dialogue with this inheritance. While her mother delved into the psychological constraints of traditional settings, Kiran Desai expands this investigation onto the global stage. Her themes broaden to include the impact of globalisation, cultural displacement, and mass migration on identity. Where Anita Desai might explore the stifled life of a woman in Delhi, Kiran Desai maps that same sense of suffocation onto the pressures and promises of the postcolonial world. This intergenerational influence is not a burden, but a sophisticated literary launching pad, allowing the younger Desai to chart the contemporary consequences of the psychological history her mother pioneered. Her novels, therefore, carry the weight of tradition while fiercely charting the neuroses of the modern age.

Desai’s oeuvre, though composed of only three novels over more than two decades, represents a significant contribution to global literature, marked by an astonishing versatility of style and a sharp, evolving thematic focus.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)

Desai’s debut novel established her mastery of comic satire and introduced her early engagement with the tension between tradition and modernity. The novel tells the delirious tale of Sampath Chawla, a young man seeking to escape the responsibilities of adult life and the lethargy of Indian society. He ultimately climbs a guava tree on his family’s property, achieving unexpected fame as a reluctant holy man or ‘godman’.

The technique here is rooted in magic realism and humour, which Desai uses to critique societal norms, the absurdity of hero-worship, and the inefficiency of officials. The return of multinational brands, such as Coca-Cola, to India is allegorically used to symbolise the cultural and ecological disruptions caused by global corporate influence in the Global South. By presenting a cast of foolish characters and a protagonist who finds freedom in literally climbing away from his life, Desai highlights the unnecessary constraints imposed by society and uses satire to expose hypocrisy and human folly.

The Inheritance of Loss (2005/2006)

The second novel marked a profound shift towards socio-cultural realism, providing a searing, politically acute examination of globalisation and colonial legacy that resonated worldwide, winning the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

Set partially in the mountainous region of Kalimpong, India, the novel contrasts the lives of characters caught between two worlds. The narrative primarily follows Sai, an anglicised orphan living with her maternal grandfather, Judge Jemubhai Patel, and Biju, the cook’s son, who is an illegal immigrant in the United States.

The novel’s thematic power lies in its examination of inherited humiliation and self-hatred. Judge Patel, a retired colonial-era judge, disdains Indian ways, even eating traditional Indian bread with a knife and fork, having internalised the colonial preference for English manners. Yet, despite his Anglophilic tendencies, he was never truly accepted by the British, leaving him perpetually adrift. Biju’s narrative, meanwhile, charts the disillusionment of chasing the American dream, where he faces racial prejudice, deplorable living conditions, and the harsh realities of global capitalism, ultimately leading him back home.

The Inheritance of Loss effectively argues that globalisation does not offer liberation but rather perpetuates the oppressive legacy of colonialism through economic disparity and cultural displacement. The ‘loss’ referred to in the title is multi-layered: the loss of identity, the loss of cultural heritage, and the loss of dignity for those caught in the unforgiving current of global migration.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a narrative tour de force that tackles the psychological and societal repercussions of mature globalisation. The novel takes place largely between 1996 and 2002, and at 688 pages, its length reflects its epic scope and ambition.

The novel is a sweeping tale that intricately combines three forms: a traditional love story, a multi-generational family saga, and a rich philosophical novel of ideas. Its structure is ambitious, featuring a huge cast of friends, older relatives, and minor characters, including the cooks, maids, and drivers whose interwoven stories reflect and inform the central romance.

The core narrative revolves around Sonia and Sunny, two young Indian immigrants navigating life and ambition in the United States. They first encounter each other by chance on an overnight train in India. This serendipitous meeting occurs only after their respective families — acting through a clumsy, old-fashioned meddling — had attempted to arrange a match, an effort that only served to drive them apart. The plot thus sets up the thematic tension between fate, the weight of family expectation, and the protagonists’ yearning for self-determined desire and genuine connection.

The protagonists are defined by their internal struggles with ambition, displacement, and the search for belonging in a world that constantly categorises them.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist, returns to India after studying in the snowy mountains of Vermont. Her psychological state is complicated by her relationship with Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a charismatic yet narcissistic artist whose influence has cast a dark spell on her life. This relationship serves as a deep dive into the psychological cost of seeking inspiration and intimacy in unstable environments, with Ilan’s narcissism being linked to his own inherited emotional deficiencies. Desai uses Sonia’s journey to create a complex portrait of an artist as a young woman, focusing on the trauma and psychological confusion that can result from predatory intimacy.

Sunny, a struggling journalist, has resettled in Brooklyn from Delhi. His motivation is largely one of escape, fleeing the suffocating control of his imperious mother, Babita, and the unresolved conflicts of his warring clan. Sunny’s professional ambitions are drawn from classic American writers, but he faces the frustrations of journalistic life, including being labelled an outsider pretending to be an insider after a difficult interview. By focusing on a journalist, the novel inherently explores how media consumption and global capitalism affect identity, particularly how the news morphs from country to country as it travels.

Babita, Sunny’s widowed mother, is central to the exploration of the mother-son bond, representing the parent who cares too much and whose fear of loneliness drives her son further away. Conversely, Ilan’s mother’s profound neglect led to his own psychological abuse of others, showing how inherited emotional deficits perpetuate cycles of damage. The protagonists are thus constrained by heavy, complicated bonds that link their generation to the preceding one, forcing them to actively struggle against family neuroses to define their own happiness.

The narrative structure emerged slowly. The plot detailing the eventual collision of Sonia and Sunny’s paths was developed much later, as Desai initially wrote separate stories for a multitude of characters until their inevitable intersection became clear. This character-driven, sprawling approach resulted in the manuscript reaching a staggering 5,000 pages at one point, necessitating years of painstaking shaping and editing to find the final, cohesive structure. Desai likened this exhaustive process to swimming, sensing the mysterious shape of the novel, like a hidden presence beneath the surface, that she could feel but not yet fully visualise. She found structural metaphors in other literature, such as Franz Kafka’s obscured castle in The Castle, seeing it as a perfect parallel for the uncertainty and eventual revelation inherent in the long, arduous journey of writing a novel.

Meticulous Detail and Artistic Precision

Desai’s method relies heavily on meticulous observation and precise material accumulation. She consistently keeps diaries to capture transient material, including accurate details of the landscape and snatches of conversation as they happen, arguing that these are difficult to recreate from memory alone.

This dedication to detail grounds her narrative in an authentic sense of place. All locales — from New York City neighbourhoods and Delhi to Venice and a fishing village in Colima, Mexico — are places Desai knows intimately. The precision extends to minute domestic objects, such as a reused squash bottle and coasters featuring botanical illustrations of tulips, which are intentionally included to establish the exact mood of prosperous, contemporary Indian households. This level of granular detail elevates the setting beyond mere backdrop; it becomes a signifier of class, cultural aspiration, and global interconnectedness.

Furthermore, Desai deliberately incorporated her personal influences into character development, finding inspiration in her own life. For example, Sonia’s elderly aunt was somewhat based on a cherished aunt whom Desai described as a Truman Capote-like character. She also explored her curiosity surrounding her German grandmother, who migrated to India in the 1920s and died when Desai was a baby, using the not knowing as a springboard for character exploration, such as Sonia’s German grandfather.

The critical consensus on Desai’s writing technique is one of consummate fluency and high literary craftsmanship. Her prose is praised for its lyrical quality, vivid imagery, and an exceptional ability to transition seamlessly between emotional registers.

The immense time span — nearly two decades — between The Inheritance of Loss and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is arguably the most defining element of Desai’s career. This gap was not borne of inactivity, but of a disciplined, meticulous creative process and the immense pressure following her early, spectacular success. The resulting novel needed to justify this long silence by being, as it was described by critics and judges, her most ambitious and accomplished work yet.

The creative process for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was a two-decade-long endeavour defined by deep character immersion and a monumental accumulation of material. Desai reported feeling so close to her characters that she disappeared into their lives. This deep emotional and psychological commitment meant the novel was initially driven by a concept rather than a plot: a pressing desire to write a novel about global loneliness, which she perceived as being ubiquitous as water in the modern age.

In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the judges for the Booker Prize highlighted this technical integration, noting that the writing moves with consummate fluency between philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny modes. This synthesis is critical to the novel’s success, providing the narrative capacity to handle a vast scope that incorporates a love story, a family saga, and a complex novel of ideas. Desai expertly weaves together humour and pathos, allowing the emotional and political critique to resonate with profound depth. Her style is a polished form, inventive in its nuances, confirming her place as a major influence in Diasporic Indian English fiction.

The central intellectual project of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is to confront the many alienations of our modern world. The mobility and opportunity afforded to characters like Sonia and Sunny, far from offering liberation, often exacerbate their sense of isolation. The novel diagnoses the pervasive feeling of global loneliness as the inevitable, structural damage inflicted by a hyper-connected, yet intensely atomised, globalised society. The rifts of class, race, country, and history, the novel suggests, prevent genuine human connection even for those with economic privilege.

This profound thematic inquiry is channelled through the novel’s core love story. In a society defined by inequality and capitalism — one that attempts to categorise individuals into neat packages of consumable products — the act of choosing and committing oneself to love becomes the ultimate form of resistance. The love story between Sonia and Sunny is framed not as a gentle escape, but as a radical act. Their struggle for intimacy against the immense backdrop of societal trials is portrayed as a revolutionary reclaiming of humanity and individuality.

The quest for happiness in the novel is therefore an arduous, conscious struggle. It is the protagonists’ attempt to forge a form of radical normalcy and belonging in an intensely unequal, abnormal world, testing whether the intimate human bond can serve as an effective salve to loneliness against the overwhelming weight of inherited cultural baggage and powerful global forces.

Kiran Desai’s career, viewed in its entirety, demonstrates a sophisticated evolution in thematic engagement, establishing her as a crucial voice in contemporary global fiction. Her works are united by a superb command of language, narrative dexterity, and a profound engagement with socio-political realities.

Her thematic focus has progressed systematically:

1. Satirising Traditional Constraints (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard): This early work focused on the localised absurdities of Indian society and the individual’s humorous search for freedom from domestic expectation, often using the unique lens of magic realism.
2. Mapping Colonial and Global Trauma (The Inheritance of Loss): This book shifted focus to the explicit, material wounds of colonial history and the economic brutality faced by migrants, chronicling the failure of the postcolonial dream.
3. Diagnosing Global Isolation (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny): The latest work tackles the psychological fallout of mature globalisation — the universal condition of profound, structural loneliness — and posits intimate connection as a necessary, radical resistance to planetary alienation.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a crowning achievement that solidifies Desai’s reputation as one of her generation’s most significant novelists. The immense duration of its creation and its eventual scale and meticulous execution underscore its importance as a definitive artistic statement. Desai’s unique ability to weave vivid, multifaceted characters and complex family narratives across continents continues to yield deep insights into the psychological and collective struggles within the postcolonial framework.

Ultimately, Desai has moved from critiquing the geopolitical forces of empire to analysing the internal, psychological conditions fostered by modern capitalism and global mobility. Her conclusion is humanistic and powerful: while the economic and historical tides of globalisation are immense and isolating, the most profound act of resistance — and the path to belonging — is the deeply personal commitment to forging and sustaining human connection in a fractured world. Her work is a testament to the idea that the greatest creative statements often require not just talent, but the patient, exhaustive labour of many years.