The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Desai's first novel since 2006's The Inheritance of Loss took nearly two decades to write, reportedly because she drafted Sonia's and Sunny's five-hundred-page strands separately before merging them — and that compositional history shows in the finished 700-page book's structure, which folds in on itself and grows self-aware about its own act of novel-making. The plot is simple on paper (two Indian expatriates, one in Vermont, one a recent Columbia graduate, whose families' histories collide) but the execution is sprawling and slow, more interested in exile and self-estrangement than plot momentum. Reviewers have been largely rapturous about its ambition and scope, though some flag uneven tonal shifts and moments where the magical-realist touches feel grafted onto an otherwise realist frame.