Booker Prize 2025: Kiran Desai’s Long-Awaited Novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Makes the Longlist
Penguin Random House India produced the book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the highly anticipated new novel by Booker Prize–winning author Kiran Desai, has been longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction. The announcement was made today by the Booker Prize Foundation, unveiling a prestigious 13-title longlist drawn from 153 submissions across the globe.
Set to release in India in September 2025 under Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton imprint, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny marks Desai’s return to fiction nearly two decades after her award-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which not only won the Booker Prize but also the National Book Critics Circle Award.
At 667 pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the longest book on this year’s longlist. An epic love story, the novel follows two Indians navigating life between the United States and India, delving into themes of migration, identity, family, race, class, and tradition—issues that continue to shape the global literary conversation.
Penguin Random House India Celebrates Another Milestone
This nomination adds to PRH India’s legacy of Booker recognition, including past wins for The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997), The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2006), and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022).
Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief and VP of Hamish Hamilton at PRH India, remarked,
“To see The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize nineteen years after The Inheritance of Loss is deeply meaningful. This novel dazzles with its ambition—intimate in detail, epic in reach, moving through questions of class, migration, and love with clarity, wit, and emotional intelligence.”
Milee Ashwarya, Publisher and SVP of the Adult Publishing Group, added,
“It is a moment of immense pride for Penguin Random House India to publish Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel. As an Indian publishing house, we are committed to championing powerful voices and transformative storytelling. This longlisting is both an honour and a celebration.”
2025 Booker Prize: Most Globally Diverse Longlist in a Decade
This year’s longlist spans nine nationalities across four continents, making it the most globally inclusive Booker Prize list in ten years. According to the 2025 chair of judges Roddy Doyle, the selected books are “alive with great characters and narrative surprises” and “examine identity, individual or national.”
The shortlist of six titles will be revealed on September 23, 2025, with the Booker Prize winner announced on November 10, 2025, at a ceremony in London.
Kiran Desai is the author of the internationally acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss. Born in India and based in New York, Desai is known for her lyrical prose and her nuanced exploration of diasporic identity, making her one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature.
Extract
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
