Kiran Desai to publish first novel since ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ came out nearly 20 years ago

By Hillel Italie, The Associated Press on December 18, 2024.

FILE - Indian author Kiran Desai speaks outside the New York Public Library on Aug. 19, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

NEW YORK (AP) – A new novel from Kiran Desai, her first fiction since the Booker Prize-winning “The Inheritance of Loss” came out nearly 20 years ago, will be published next fall.

Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is scheduled for release in September by Hogarth, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. Hogarth is calling the novel “a sweeping tale” of two Indians finding their way in the U.S. amidst personal and historical forces.

“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 Wednesday. “I think only a novel can get at the raw truth regarding what people are privately thinking and negotiating.”

The 53-year-old Desai debuted in 1998 with “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” the comic tale of a young man who chooses to spend his life in a tree. Eight years later, she received international acclaim for “The Inheritance of Loss,” released in the U.S. by Atlantic Monthly Press. Winner of the Booker and the National Book Critics Circle award, her novel follows the lives of an undocumented Indian immigrant in the U.S. and of an Anglicized Indian overseas in the state of West Bengal. Desai was 35 when she received the Booker, the youngest woman at the time to win the prize.

Desai’s editor at Hogarth, David Ebershoff, said in a statement that her new book is “an expansive tale of multiple generations, a novel infused with equal amounts of heart and mind.”